Swap Size?

[gstuartj]

Hello all! I'm still pretty new to linux and was wondering... I'm getting a new 'puter soon, and I'm trying to figure out how much swap space I should create. I have heard it should never be more than 500 Megs, but I'm not sure if that's true. My new system will probably have 1 Gig of ram, and a 120 Gig HD. Suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[jasonlambert]

500 megs would be fine.

Basically it would mean you could have 1.5Gb of data in RAM at any one time, which is quite a lot. If you ever find yourself using 500Mb of swapspace its proberly time to buy some more ram anyway

Jason

[stathisx]

generally i have heard that swap should be 1,5-2 *RAM .i don't know if it wrong or not....i have 1 gb ram and swap was never used for me (swap=800 mb).

[eBopBob]

I too have been told that the amount for SWAP should be two times that of your ram. For example if you have 256mb ram, then SWAP should be 512mb, or some people just make it 500mb for ease.

[stathisx]

as i mentioned in another post swap is useful when you run many jobs(processes at the same time).so if you are watching a dvd movie and the same time you compile a kernel or installing a program swap will increase performance.although if you do a job at a time swap will not be useful.i suggest to have 500mb of swap as jason said as hard disks we have are above 40gb i think so it's not a problemof wasting space..

[Giro]

I agree with 500Mb swap space I use this in all my Linux boxes. I have never seen one use more then about 50Mb swap and they have 256, 512 and 1024Mb RAM.

[kkubasik]

the rule used to be 2* ram = swap, but nowadays with people getting into the multi gig ranges fro swap, its not practical, and can actualy slow you down, after 512 ram, just give yourself 500 of swap. Its handy for buffering, but unless you have like fibrechannel drives, the write speed will impare operations too much.

[gstuartj]

Thanks for all the responses everyone! 500 it is!