[ale] Anyone know if this is true?

[Jim Kinney]

If there is >16Gb RAM and people are sweating about holding back RAM + 2GB
for swap, maybe a bigger hard drive is a good idea.

When ram WAY more expensive, swap space was used often. The rest of the
system was so slow it was an irritation and not an impediment. Modern
systems are nearly 3 orders of magnitude faster while drive access has only
increased 10x.
So for a small, 1 or 2 spindle server, where suspend and hibernate are not
options, less swap than ram makes sense.
A laptop needs ram+ for swap for laptop things.
Big servers with many local fast spindles can afford ram+ swap spread over
multiple drive in chunk sizes equal to a combination of page size and drive
page suze.(crap. Wrong term. Large inode size, um, crap, brain fart on drive
transfer data chunk).
Here's the fun part: if your swap is on lvm space, you can change the size
based on observed need.
Fun part #2: unused swap space is pretty painless to have lying around
except for the OCD crowd that tends to whine on the mailing list :-) For
them it's lile slowly running their fingernails down a mile long chalkboard.
On Oct 12, 2011 9:43 PM, "Tavarvess Ware" <tavarvessware at gmail.com> wrote:

> Scott I read the ram x 2= swap in my Linux classes as well and have
> generally followed that, but with memory soaring as it has lately i am
> starting to rethink that.  A system 48gigs of memory would be 96 in
> swap..... I wonder if te old format has changed and I haven't heard yet.
>  On Oct 12, 2011 9:32 PM, "Scott Castaline" <skotchman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10/12/2011 04:14 PM, planas wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2011-10-12 at 15:13 -0400, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
>> >> 'Just so you all know, when determining how much space to assign to
>> >> swap: Swap isn't just used for paging or virtual memory management;
>> swap
>> >> is also used by power management for suspend-to-disk (hibernation). '
>> >>
>> >> I seriously don't know, so I'm asking.
>> >>
>> >
>> > I have seen that a good swap size is ~1.5x the RAM.
>> > --
>> > Jay Lozier
>> > jslozier at gmail.com
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>> I remember from somewhere that upto 2GB use 2.0x RAM above 2GB of RAM go
>> with 1:1 ratio so 4Gb RAM = 6GB swap. I don't remember why 2x on the
>> first 2GB and this goes back to when 4GB was a lot on pre-configured
>> retail boxes. So like Geoffrey I can't see having 18GB of swap for a
>> 16GB machine.
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>
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