Swap partition

[Nemo - earth native]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 05:53:52AM -0800, Gary Woodman did utter:
> > 
> > I've a quick query about swap sizes.
> > I'm running a file server, 128mb RAM. What size of swap partition
> > would be appropriate?
> > 
> > Red Hat "Reccomends" about 2x you RAM is best.
> 
> That's a good rule of thumb... but it depends on your workload. If
> you're just serving up files and printers and so on, it's probably
> plenty.

My opinion is that this rule of thumb was more appropriate back when
32meg was common and 64 was WOW. Dispite the advancement of common memory
hogging apps (gnome, kde, mozilla, etc), I think that for most people,
CPU and memory specs have outpaced them... 

On my desktop, dispite running X twice (2 users on the system
simultaneously), and thus galeon twice, and a few other things... I'm
rarely touching swap from 512meg ram... my rule of thumb is now 1x ram.

Back to the original poster... 128meg ram... file server... it might
depend on how hard the fileserver will be serving, and maybe via what
protocols... the somewhere between the 1x and 2x rule should be more
than enough. 

(I just checked my fileserver at home - which has a 4gig /home mounted
from it via nfs (it also shares this via samba), and is probably used
most heavily when I load 12meg mailboxes in mutt, or play ogg files... has
only 32meg of ram, 70meg or so of swap... 

`free` says: 
             total       used       free     shared    buffers    cached
Mem:         29856      29016        840       6120       2400    20476
-/+ buffers/cache:       6140      23716
Swap:        77388       9668      67720

Doesn't look like the swap is really being used much. (hmm, uptime hits
100days in a few hours too. neat.)

Of course, if I really gave it a workload...

.../nemo
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