Resizing swap partition....

[Guest smoketoomuch]

Hello. I have 128 RAM and will buy additional 256. I have a swap partition of 250 megs. My question is: should I have a bigger partition if I add 256 more? If so, than how can I resize it safely?

 

I have a 20g. harddrive with 5g Vfat (with win98) and 15G for linux. I thought to resize my swap by doing a scandisc/defrag on my Windows, than resize it in the Mandrake Control Center. Unmounting it at first of course... than I will resize my swap to fill out the now empty space. Can I do that? Is it safe? - I mean I don't want to loose any data on either of my partitions.

 

Your opinions/experiences would be greatly appreciated.

[pmpatrick]

I personally wouldn't bother increasing swap unless there is a need. You currently have 128Mb of RAM plus 250Mb of swap for a total of physical memory plus swap of 378 Mb. You are going to increase to 384Mb of RAM which will give you a total of 734Mb. That should be more than enough for most purposes. Try it out and see how much swap you are using under heavy load. I doubt that you will see swap being used that much with that much RAM.

[SoulSe]

Your swap space should equal roughly double the amount of RAM you have, i.e.: 128MB RAM = 256MB Swap

 

This is only a guideline, pmpat. was right, you have more than enough already.

[Guest smoketoomuch]

Thanks folks :) I'm already testing it - it seems that indeed, there is no need for resize - 1mb of swapmemory is used currently. I only asked because I heard the same thing about swap=2xRam - I wonder now what is the upper limit to that rule ... and why it is 2x? It is viable in case of 128megs - but above that ...?

 

Anyway, thanks again for your replies :D

[Guest JaseP]

I currently have 512MB RAM and the swap is hardly used at all. I set it to 1GB just because I had the Hard Drive real estate to spare.

 

The "double your swap file" rule only applies to RAM amounts under 128MB for the most part.

[dalee]

Hi,

 

I have only 128megs of ram and I set my swap to equal it. I tried using more and less, but my boxen didn't much care for it.

 

I think the "general rule" comes from the days when 64megs of ram was a lot. So you tended to get into the swap a lot more often. But these days with machines having 128megs or more of ram it, it isn't so critical as to the size. Unless you are running a lot of processes. I have even heard of people with vast amounts of ram (say 512 or more) running just fine without a swap.

 

Just my .02,

 

dalee

 

Edited for spelling. (Man, I hate "Natural Keyboards")