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10.4: Move swap files to another drive
Authored by: TigerKR on Feb 14, '06 06:36:44PM

I'm not sure where you have come up with the idea of having 5x RAM as a size for your VM partition. I have always read that 2x RAM is ideal.

"Choosing the right amount of swap space can be a bit of an art. A good rule of thumb is that your swap space should be two or three times as much as the available physical memory (RAM). You should also have at least 64 MB of swap, so if you have less than 32 MB of RAM in your computer then set the swap amount to 64 MB." - FreeBSD install guide

"Your swap partitions should total at least twice the size of the amount of RAM memory you have installed in your machine." - vmunix install guide

"Many people follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. This rule is nonsense. On a modern system, that's a LOT of swap, most people prefer that their systems never swap. Use what is appropriate for your needs... your swap space should be [at least] slightly larger than the amount of main memory you are likely to ever have in the system." - OpenBSD FAQ

I used to have 1.5 GB of RAM and I used to use swap a bunch. I have 3 GB of dedicated swap space, but I've never hit the ceiling on that. Since I've upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, I almost never go beyond the initial 64 MB swapfile. But occasionally I do. And when I do, I'm usually on a deadline, and I need things to move as quickly as possible.

I think that you may be confusing swap space with scratch space. Applications like photoshop use scratch files (basically VM for a specific application). And yes, for photoshop, it is recommended that you allocate at least 5x - of your largest file size that you'd ever work with in photoshop. So if you work with 5 200 MB photoshop files concurrently (200MB is a really big file - for comparison a 7.1 megapixel RAW file is about 10 MB), you should have 5 GB of dedicated scratch space. But you should not typically have your swap and scratch in the same place. In fact, no only do you want them on different partitions, but if you can, you want them to be on different drives, or better yet, different busses.



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