CrunchBang Linux Forums » CrunchBang Talk » swap area
what was the maximum swap space that you ever used
in my case it was 4mb after about 2 weeks of uptime
i am asking this because i feel i have way too much space assigned for swap
when i first installed linux i used 10gb, then i moved down to 5 then to 2 and yesterday i resized it to 50mb and i still find 50mb to be too much for it seeing that i've never had more than 4 mb
Swap is not necessary if you have lots of RAM and you never use the hibernate feature.
If you use hibernate, you'll want swap equal to or greater than your RAM.
The recommended amount of SWAP is, twice the RAM. But, if you have 2Gb or more -- you never use 'any' SWAP.
Other, than gParted often won't let you delete all SWAP partitions. You should have 'some'
If there is only 1 OS on your computer, you really don't need any SWAP.
I read that the only time you really need/use SWAP is when the computer goes into 'hibernation'.
I once used up 256MB (Arch default swap size).
I've seen it slowly climb all the way up my 2.3gigs (+1.5 gig RAM) on a long gdb run for school project.
[and of course do it much faster in those "lets loop on 'new int' and see what happens..." tests 
]
a.
I think the only way I will ever see it on my newish desktop (MSI K9A2 Neo MB, Phenom x4 9600, 6GB DDR2) is to write a program that just eats up more ram in an infinite loop. Nothing can make it budge... Very little can happen to max out it's CPU either.... To me it is an odd situation, but I finally have a machine that is just too powerful for any normal task to slow down. And it rather outdated.
Now that being said, my MSI Wind (Atom 1.6ghz, 1GB DDR2) has never really needed to use swap space either, back around 2001-2ish I remember having to use a whole gig of my 6GB Quantum Bigfoot (oh, yes I had a 5.25" hard drive) just to ensure that my Mandrake system would run (Packard Bell MB, Intel Triton 75mhz, 64MB RAM). And I used Blackbox more often than Gnome or KDE back then.
Honestly, it just looks like Linux has got better at how much ram the applications take versus the amount equipped on current machines. Windows still allocates a huge amount of virtual memory and I can't quite figure out why, I can turn virtual memory off and it is no problem to run any game my machine can run, so why on earth would it be there in the first place?
To me it is an odd situation, but I finally have a machine that is just too powerful for any normal task to slow down.
Did you purposely build/want an overly powerful machine?
i notice swap area being used when i suspend the current session but only like 32 kb
Val_B wrote:To me it is an odd situation, but I finally have a machine that is just too powerful for any normal task to slow down.
Did you purposely build/want an overly powerful machine?
Not really, cost was the primary factor. That and ensuring the parts were from manufacturers that I liked. My previous board was an ECS Elitegroup and that was fine, but I really prefer MSI, Abit and Asus. I managed to snag a used MSI Board (from a friend who is getting a x6 phenom) with more ram slots for free, then upped my processor from the x3 Phenom to the x4 9600. Overall I have about $200-300 invested in my desktop, this what I usually will aim to spend.
Frequently that level of cash doesn't really get me anything all that nice versus the level of modern processing power, but the current setup seems far more effective than some of the previous. Even though the x6 is out now, and my Radeon HD2600 512MB isn't nearly as powerful as it was two years ago, I can't say that the software I have ever taxes the PC and that is a situation I really haven't been in before.
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