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Old 9th July 2008
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
Posts: 1,547
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The way I look at it, if my computer does not have enough virtual memory to complete the tasks I need of it, I can't use my computer to do what I need/want it to do, hence I've screwed myself by design.



All of my systems have swap space and /tmp allocated based on usage and hardware parameters.


I typically will use as much swap space as I ever intend to have RAM installed. And /tmp big enough to accomdate the largest unpacking jobs I expect to run, typically 0.1~1500mb


For example, my desktop has 2GB of RAM and 4GB of swap, it's maximum capacity is 4gb and disk space is huge. It rarely has extreme loads but sometimes does, hence lots of swap just in case of WW III !


My laptop has 512MB of RAM and 1GB of Swap which is the most I ever expect to have installed, although she tops out at 2GB of RAM.

I'm prone to doing a lot of things in short order on computers, to the point that I usually call it "omni tasking".


My laptop used to have 512MB of Swap and I've seen top come to close suggesting that my swap space is approaching exhaustion (~10s of mb left). I have not had that happen more then once or twice but by George, doubling my swap space is a small price for paranoia on an 80gb disk!

I never trust memory usage reported by any program, top included but I do consider it a guideline.



The PC pressed into service as a file server has about 300MB of swap and 384MB RAM -8MB for the gfx card.


Disk space was initially small (8GB), I have no reason to buy extra PC100, and it sits idle most of the time.


SSH, NFS, and MySQL currently running 'round the clock with provisions for Samba and printing software to be added later. She doesn't have much need for swapping, so the swap space was kept quite minimal.


normally if RAM is small (e.g. <1GB) or disk space cheap (e.g. > 80GB) I will usually opt for more swap then I need to worry about because I *can*.


In this case, extreme swap would've been more dentimental then memory problems.
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