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Swap partition size
Authored by: VernerEgon on Aug 10, '04 01:17:43PM
Pedro Estarque wrote:
swapfile0 64 MB
swapfile1 64 MB
swapfile2 128 MB
swapfile3 256 MB
swapfile4 512 MB

But they never exceed twice the amount of RAM you have. For example: I have 768 MB of RAM, so I will never have a swapfile5 as it would be 1GB in size and the total would be 2 GB, more then 1536 which is the double.

I am afraid that this is nonsense. I have often had more than twice the size swapfiles than my RAM - and I even have a GB in my PB, and I cannot understand why it should not exceed that when your open applications need more memory than what you have.
I even think that limiting a swap space to less than 3-5 GB, no matter what size your physical RAM is at, will lead you into trouble sometime.
Having had an iBook with about 1-1.5 GB left on the harddisk and 320 MB RAM, it often occured to me that there was no more space on the harddisk because of swapfiles. Had I only had 640 MB on a separate swap partition, my iBook would have crashed constantly.
My advice is not to trust old *nix-rules of the thumb. Hell, even on my AIX at work, we upped the VM to 20 GB at one time even though we only had 8 GB of physical memory back then. But using Smitty that is of course no big deal...

OSX is quite a different animal than what old BSD- and *nix-folks here seem to be used to. It certainly does not stop at twice the size of RAM.



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