Star Debunking the "2x Ram as Swap Space" Rule
Linked by David Adams on Thu 20th Nov 2008 04:19 UTC
General Unix 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 I’ve 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?
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RE: Comment by Traumflug
by Bill Shooter of Bul on Thu 20th Nov 2008 15:59 UTC in reply to "Comment by Traumflug"
Bill Shooter of Bul
Member since:
2006-07-14

If you install a 32-bit OS on a machine with 4 GB physical RAM you can safely ignore swap as the OS can't even address the extra. A common scenario these days, yet most Linux distros still insist on allocating a swap partition.


No, 32 bit linux can address more than 4 GB with Physical Address Extension (PAE) support ( which every processor has had since Pentium Pro) .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

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