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Re: Partitions
"Mark M. Wilson" <[email protected]> writes:
> Actually, depending on your system resources and what you want to
> use linux for, you may be able to "get away with" not using a swap
> partition.
It's not something I would try, unless I was using a swap *file*. Swap
files are slower than partitions but they do live on normal
partitions rather than needing one of their own. They are quite handy
if you upgrade your RAM and don't want to repartition your machine.
I've never tried using only one of these but I imaginge you may well
get a performance drop.
> If your system has generous memory and a decent
> processor, you may never notice its absence. I run the little
> indicators on the Gnome panel at random times, and the swap
> partition activity indicator is never doing much.
Never doing *much* but maybe often doing *something*. The last I heard
was that in 2.4 kernels you should have twice as much swap as RAM
because that's what the kernel expects. You may be able to get away
with less but there are no guarantees. Things may have changed in
recent kernels but in early 2.4 there was an assumption that this much
swap would be present and no checking to see if it wasn't. I'm not a
kernel hacker - this is all AFAIK :-)
> Maybe don't bother with making it much bigger than 128 MB?
No, I'd always make it at least twice the size of the RAM. The more
memory you have, the more that it might need to put somewhere in a
hurry. The fact is that such an event may be rarer in occurrence but
it's consequences are going to be greater.
I have a server with 512MB RAM. It normally uses no swap at all, but I
can quite easily make it use up a very large amount of swap if I start
doing silly things to upset it (e.g. tail </dev/zero >/dev/null).
An acceptable compromise might be to have a small-ish swap partition
which seems to be roughly what you normally use and make up the rest
in swap file for emergencies.
OTOH disk space is fairly cheap now, so unless you're really
constrained for some reason there's no gerat hardship in having a
decent sized swap partition.
--
Richard Watson GnuPG/PGP:0x55227960 http://www.doilywood.org.uk
e-mail:[email protected] jabber:[email protected]
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