Swap / Was ->Re: INstallation Questions

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Mike Starke wrote:

> Does the average user need to even consider a swap
> as large as 512Mb? How often (if at all) is it going
> to hit the swap file? Mine never see's the light of day.

Maybe.

One one workstation, I have 128MB memory (physical). And I still use
around 140MB of swap. This is used by two users doing X (one local and
one remote) runing web browsers, email clients, numerous rxvt's, etc.

> Years ago I had a mail server (PII 300 or something) with about 128Mb
> ram and the same on the swap. The swap never saw the light of day. 300 users
> on the system  too.

I guess it depends on what they are doing and using.

> Have I missed something in the swap calculation, or is the ole
> (swap = ~2x ram) a rough calc only on systems with low ram?

When I build software like glibc or qt, I can really use up memory quick.
I have several systems that have a full gig of swap (and 768MB to 1 GB of
ram).

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/