[CentOS] Swap Considerations

[Feizhou]

> Of course. But I'm a laid-off engineer. If you like, I'd gladly take
> donations for more RAM. In the meantime, this machine remains 256M.
> 
> This is a single-user desktop with no external access servers
> like SSH, Apache, or NFS running. I have a firewall to enforce
> no external access, which "stealths" all ports except the e-mail
> port, which is denied.

sshd takes little resources and I use it because I sometimes need to be 
able to access my home machine from work. With a desktop, what really 
matters is them memory hogs firefox, thunderbird and other GTK rubbish. 
If opera's IMAP client was better, I would switch over completely. Or 
maybe I should just try mutt again...

> 
> I find that on my machine, memory usage often looks like this:
> 
> Mem:    248088k total,   244192k used,     3896k free,    11860k buffers
> Swap:   524120k total,   182916k used,   341204k free,    43576k cached
> 

Here is mine.

free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           503        440         63          0         84        233
-/+ buffers/cache:        122        380
Swap:         2047          0       2047

At the moment, there is nothing running except KDE and konsole with a 
few terminals. swappiness set to 0 :D.

When I get firefox and thunderbird fired up, memory usage can go through 
the roof so I have allocated 2GB (maximum swap partition size btw) for 
my swap partition. I get the odd 1GB worth of swap once in a while that 
takes quite a while to release when I close firefox and thunderbird...

So there you go. Set up as much swap as you need/want for a desktop.