
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say Iâve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your
Linux / UNIX swap space be?
Member since:
2007-08-29
Fortunately, RAM is so cheap that you can have it both ways. I don't use swap because I don't like twiddling my fingers while I wait for formerly-idely programs to get paged back in to real memory, and there is enough left over for a disk cache (is this what system monitors refer to as the 'system cache'?).