[clug] to swap or not to swap that is the question

[Sam Couter]

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at svana.org> wrote:
> This idea of scaling swap according to the amount of physical RAM you
> have always seemed a little odd to me...

At the risk of making an arse of myself again...

I think the logic was that if you needed more than (X x RAM) swap space,
the machine was going to be unusably slow anyway, and performance
wouldn't improve by having any more swap available. Values for X
probably vary widely, but I've always been told the value of 2. Disk
space wasn't always as cheap as it is now, so this rule of thumb was a
way of not dedicating too much of an expensive resource to a single use.

With memory prices the way they are these days, you can probably afford a
desktop machine that doesn't *need* any swap at all.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:sam at couter.dropbear.id.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at teknohaus.dyndns.org
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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