RE: RAM and swap partition

[james miller <jamtat@mailandnews.com>]

Let me pose the RAM question in another way to see if it can elicit a 
generic, "rule-of-thumb" response this way. If a person uses their 
computer as a sort of personal workstation using a fairly recent distro 
and requires that it have an Xwindows gui, using applications like web 
browsers, email clients, wordprocessing software and maybe Gimp on 
occassion, at what point would such a person need to have a swap 
partition? In other words, can it be stated in somewhat generic terms 
"if said user had less than X MB RAM, they will definitely need a swap 
partition"? And what about guidelines for swap partition size in such a 
case: can such be stated as well? Like, say, "if this individual has 
only 32 MB RAM, he should have a 64 MB swap partition" or "if he has 64 
MB RAM he'll only need a 64 MB swap partition"?

Thanks, James

>===== Original Message From 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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