Linux: Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?

Posted by nixcraft on Nov 19, 2008 5:08 PM EDT
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Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?

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Outdated rules of thumb jezuch 20 3,172 Nov 22, 2008 7:01 PM

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