Re: RAM and swap partition

[Chuck Gelm <nc8q@gelm.net>]

Ditto to what Ray said.

 Perhaps you could run your system with a 'swap file' and see
how big it ever gets.  Then make a swap partition just that size
or a little larger.  ;-)

 My current firewall-router (aDSL to 100 Mb LAN) has 32 megabytes
  of RAM and has not used any swap memory, AFAICR.
 Another workstation with 64 M of RAM has used 3 M of swap.
 Another workstation with 160 M of RAM has used 2 M of swap.
 Another laptop with 16 M of RAM, XFfree86 v4.0.3, and I just
  ran Netscape v4.77 under fvwm95, loaded a small web page,
  has used 2.6 M of swap.

 IMHO, it depends.  ;-)

HTH, Chuck

Ray Olszewski wrote:
> 
> At 01:15 PM 12/8/02 +0000, Rolf Edlund wrote:
> >Originally to: james niland
> >
> >
> >  jn> I know some people who run happily without a swap at all.
> >
> >How low RAM can I use, without running a swap ? Can I for example
do it on
> >a 486
> >with 4 MB RAM ?
> 
> The way you ask this question, it has no real answer. How little
memory a
> system can run with depends on what tasks it is doing. And the
choice of
> CPU is pretty much irrelevant to this question (its only slight
relevance
> is in the smaller size of CPU-specific kernels).
> 
> That said ... running any sort of Linux system in less than 8 MB of
real
> (not swap) RAM poses special challenges ... most modern distros
can't even
> install on such systems (only Slackware, I think, still offers a
"low
> memory" install option) and you won't be able to do much with such
a
> system. In practice, the smallest systems I've ever run without
swap were
> 486s with 16 MB of RAM, and that was for special purpose systems
like
> routers. While these days I routinely run my workstations without a
swap
> partition, they have at least 256 MB of RAM.
> 
> --
> -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the
odds!"--------
> Ray Olszewski                                   -- Han Solo
> Palo Alto, California, USA                        ray@comarre.com
>
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>
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