Re: 2.4 and 2GB swap partition limit

Rogier Wolff
2001-04-28T14:12:09Z

Wakko Warner wrote:
> > So you've spent almost $200 for RAM, and refuse to spend $4 for 1Gb of
> > swap space. Fine with me.

> I put this much ram into the system to keep from having swap. I
> still say swap=2x ram is a stupid idea. I fail to see the logic in
> that. Disk is much much slower than ram and if you're writing all
> ram to disk that's also slow.

> I have a machine with 256mb of ram and no disk. It runs just fine
> w/o swap. Only reason I even had swap here is if I ran something
> that used up all my memory and it has happened.

> Since when has linux started to be like windows "our way or no way"?

I've ALWAYS said that it's a rule-of-thumb. This means that if you
have a good argument to do it differently, you should surely do so!

I maintain a 32M machine without swap. My workstation has 768Mb RAM
and almost 2G swap:

/home/wolff> free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 770872 766724 4148 0 259816 78308
-/+ buffers/cache: 428600 342272
Swap: 1843212 1840 1841372
/home/wolff>

That disk space is just sitting there. Never to be used. I spent $400
on the RAM, and I'm now reserving about $8 worth of disk space for
swap. I think that the $8 is well worth it. It keeps my machine
functional a while longer should something go haywire... As I said:
If you don't want to see it that way: Fine with me.

Roger.

--
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