On Tuesday 03 April 2007 08:31 am, Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
The original rule (still valid, AFAIC) was:
"swap should be NO MORE than the double RAM"
I've been around a while, and used Linux since somewhere around '94/'95 (an old Slackware distribution at that time, based on Linux kernel version 0.99, iirc).
If you had very little memory, you probably wanted a lot of swap, and in those days you didn't have much memory.
Or how about Xenix running on a TRS-80 Model 2000, with 128K (not M, K) of memory, then you might have wanted swap of double memory.
Somehow, somewhere I got into my head that you wanted at least the same swap as memory, because if linux dumped it would try to write it's memory into the swap partition first if it could, for later examination.
That's never been true, and I was disabused of my erroneous notion (and embarrassed just a bit) when I asked the question of Robert Love; based on his book "Linux Kernel Development",
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Kernel-Development-Robert-Love/dp/0672325128
I think he knows a bit about the kernel.
<smile>
Jeff