How much swap?

kaffeen · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:27 pm Post subject: How much swap?

Greetings,

I'm soon going to be wiping my hard drive and starting over and have a question about the amount of swap space needed. The PC in question is an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1024 MB PC3200 RAM and an 80GB SATA drive. When I originally installed Gentoo, I put aside 2GB for a swap partition as more of a habit of using the 'swap = 2 x RAM' formula. However, even when compiling such programs as OpenOffice or Mozilla, I've never seen more than 50MB of swap used.

Is there a point at which a swap partition is no longer necessary? Would there be huge drawbacks to not creating a swap partition this time around? I am not a huge gamer either (well, I am but I dual-boot and use Windows for gaming).

Any suggestions on how much swap, if any, to use?

liber! · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:42 pm Post subject:

For 1Gb of ram it isn't necessary to create an extra swap partition.
I wouldn't create it on a home pc, but on a server I would (you don't want to lock ever a server that's remote) create a small swap partition of 256mb or something, certainly not 2gb, but it depends all what your going to do with a server (with a database server, I would go for more).

Greets,
Nathan!

kaffeen · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:46 pm Post subject:

This is just my personal desktop so I'll just skip that partition this time around.

Deranger · Veteran Joined: 26 Aug 2004 Posts: 1215

kaffeen · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:49 pm Post subject:

Space really isn't an issue. Like I said in my original post, I'd barely even seen swap used so wasn't sure if it was really needed if you had a certain amount of RAM or more.

chunderbunny · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:57 pm Post subject:

I don't really see how not having any swap decreases performance. It's not like you ever really use more than 512MB or RAM for actual programs, and having more swap does nothing to increase the performance of disk cache.

Persoanlly I always advocate a "256MB of swap, no matter how much RAM you have" policy, but if I had a 1GB of RAM I would probably turn the swap off.

kaffeen · Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2004 11:17 pm Post subject:

I'll just make it 1GB for now. It's an 80GB drive of which I've never used more than 30GB of space (including both Windows and Linux installations). Then I won't have to worry about resizing partitions in the future.

mike4148 · l33t Joined: 09 Sep 2003 Posts: 641

Don't make one. You can always make one and activate it whenever you want, should you decide you need one. The only major difference I see is that you run out of memory more quickly. If you, like most people, have never even come close to running out of memory, then that shouldn't be a problem.

I don't even have swap file support built into my kernel (amd64 2GB RAM desktop).