At 12:40 PM 7/15/02 +0530, you wrote:
Your swap should ideally be twice your RAM.
Could someone explain this to me... (please no lengthy explantation of what swap space means, please... I'm a computer science graduate :) )
[snip]
(Instead what I've done is to remove the swap partition and allocate swap files if I ever do anything memory-intensive enough to require more space... and that has never happened)
You are right. But that rule-of-thumb is of the days when 32Mb RAM used to be *lots* of RAM. The reason for the 2 to 2 1/2 times larger swap was to have sufficient virtual memory to load reasonable amount of software without running out of memory. For example on my 386 with 8Mb RAM I had a 20Mb swap partition. When I used to start up X and netscape most of the swap got used. But I agree that beyond 128Mb of RAM the swap size should be fixed to about 100Mb or something... unless specifically required otherwise.
quasi