The bigger the swap partition the more vertuall memorry your computer has. Vertuall memory is like your computer ram except its rearly on Disk this means its slow.
This means if an application is squanering resources and steeling more and more memory which it does not need, it will slow down your mashine to a hault until no more memory is available from disk when the application crashes (called a memmorry leak). THis means having more vertual memorry means your maschine goes slower before killing an application due to the ends of its memorry being reached, having less will cause the computer to kill the application due to a memmory leak quicker.
In normall situations a large amount of space for applications in memorry is a good idea and people generally say that 1-2 times your physical ram size is sensible. Indeed this was right for a 32 MB computer but these days I have not a clue. I have 256MB of swap and have allways had on this drive although I reasently upgraded from 64MB ram to 194MB because I like memorry leaks to crash slowly although with this amount of ram I doubt I need it all untill I start kylix which needs 128MB on its own once you load it the help pages and the IDE.
Owen
On 08-Aug-01 David Freeman wrote:
Ok, not being that great an expert at linux installs, I am wondering what people would recommend for the swap partition size, I have 384MB of ram, so am thinking a 256MB swap file is plenty for what I will be doing. What do others think?
Also dare I ask what peoples views are on partitioning?
Thanks
D
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Date: 08-Aug-01 Time: 23:56:35