should i adjust swap size?

[leo5111]

i have a abit ip35pro board& core 2 duo cpu and a bfg 9800gt, i have 4 gigs of ram on a 32 bit install, this is a regualr system not a laptop or anything my swap file is 2.86 gigs should i leave it as is, or make bigger or smaller? if needs to be resized how do i do it? thanks

[meton_magis]

I have 4 gigs on my desktop, and went with only 1 GB of swap, but I use my ram for larger than everage ramdisks. You really don't even need swap with 4 GB of ram. If you need it, you can add it (if you left unalocated space.) If you need the hard drive space, you're probably OK to get rid of it. If you don't, may as well leave it, but you are probably fine with whatever you do.

[coopstah13]

By the sounds you are not doing anything intensive to even require that size of swap. On my machine with 4g ram I'm not sure I even have swap, and if I do it is less than 1g. The only reason to have any more than that is if you are using a hibernate feature. If in the future you require more swap for any reason, you could always create a swap file on disk and use that, instead of mucking around with resizing partitions and such.

[D-cat]

Referencing my own swap area, I'd say you don't need it.

I have 4GB RAM and I included 4GB of swap (in anticipation of heavy DVD video processing). For my normal computer usage, my swap space used is at 0k. I do occasionally use some swap, but I've never observed it go over about 250MB, even when I'm making DVD videos. YMMV, but I'm guessing you'd probably be safe dumping the swap and reclaiming the space.

As far as required, right now you are not required to do anything; your current setup will work fine. It's all preference.

[leo5111]

well i like you i do dvd re-encoding and re-encodeing of high definition videos

[Rubberman]

I run a 64bit system w/ 8GB of RAM and 16GB of swap. I don't hit the swapper very often, but sometimes I deal with large in-memory data sets for analysis and can hit the 8GB limit with my normal application suite running. Only increase swap if you really need to. You can use the swapon command to enable a swap device if you need to add swap space. If for temporary usage, you can use a USB thumb drive.

[D-cat]

There's also the possibility of creating a swap file, and using swapon to mount it as if it was a swap partition. There are a few rules about making it work. This is the normal method for Knoppix and some other live distros.

Adding Linux Swap File System - How to | Linux4All.Net