my swap partition question,.

opentaka · l33t Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 840 Location: Japan

gday,
I've been using gentoo for a while and I realized that I never see gentoo using my swap.
now, from htop, swap is 0MB used.

I'v got 512MB, so I set to 1GB swap on install, but I dont think I need that much.
should I just repartition to just like 200MB? or is it have to be bigger then RAM?

ty
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jhunholz · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:33 am Post subject:

Depending on what you run on your computer, swap will be used or not. With 512MB of ram, I would leave at least 512mb in swap, but 1GB doesn't hurt. On my desktop I have 1.5GB of ram, and with that much I don't think you ever hit your swap.

opentaka · l33t Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 840 Location: Japan

oh cool.
I only use it as "desktop", normal surfing, ssh ftpd for private, DHCPD, NAT some gaming.
and I never seen swap is used, so I think I just gonna reduce to 600MB for now and see what happens.
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Gentoonie · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:04 pm Post subject:

Same here for me. I got 1GB of RAM, and the only time i ever saw my swap being used was when i opend my video folder and nautilus started to generate thumbnails for every file, my box started to laag real hard. But that has been the only time i saw my swap being used.
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jmbsvicetto · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 5:20 pm Post subject:

Hi.

I have a laptop with 512MB RAM and can assure you that if you start using OpenOffice, Firefox and emerging some packages, you'll soon see your swap being used.
However, as to your point of having more RAM not necessarily mean having a larger swap, I do agree. I believe that old rule of having swap = 2 * RAM, doesn't apply today in most cases. Furthermore, when your system starts swapping , it takes a huge toll.

starrbuck · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 6:01 pm Post subject:

Swap should be 1 to 1.5 times your RAM.
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Kaapeli · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 9:06 pm Post subject:

I have 1GB of ram. After a reboot, it usually takes at least 24 hours before my system is swapping anything. After the first 24 hours, few megabytes of swap is being used. After week of uptime, about 50 MB of swap is in use. The swap usage seems to increase when I compile something large or do some other memory intensive task, but the swap usage doesn't seem to go down after I have finished the memory intensive tasks. Right now, after 13 days of uptime, my swap usage is 130 MB and it doesn't usually much above that. If it goes (compiling something or other memory intensive work), it will usually come back to about 100 - 150 MB within 12 hours of normal desktop use. If I restart X, the swap usage always drops to about 20 - 40 MB.

I'm also running VMware almost constantly and I reserve 256 MB for the guest OS. I assume that the swapping pressure would be much lower if I didn't use VMware.
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opentaka · l33t Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 840 Location: Japan

ya, swap bigger is better, but I dont lik to see my 1GB wasting for swap and swap is not using it

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"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent" - Marilyn vos Savant