From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Oct 7 5:32:47 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from maila.telia.com (maila.telia.com [194.22.194.231]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C772437B401 for ; Sun, 7 Oct 2001 05:32:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from d1o913.telia.com (d1o913.telia.com [195.252.44.241]) by maila.telia.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id f97CWa300360 for ; Sun, 7 Oct 2001 14:32:37 +0200 (CEST) Received: from ertr1013.student.uu.se (h185n2fls20o913.telia.com [212.181.163.185]) by d1o913.telia.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA25763 for ; Sun, 7 Oct 2001 14:32:32 +0200 (CEST) Received: (qmail 5979 invoked by uid 1001); 7 Oct 2001 12:32:31 -0000 Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 14:32:31 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson To: default Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ideal swap partition space... Message-ID: <20011007143231.A5864@student.uu.se> Mail-Followup-To: default , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22.1i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 05:15:12AM -0500, default wrote: > Hi, > > I'm curious about setting up the amount of space for the swap partition... > is there any ideal amount for FreeBSD? Or is it dependant on the size/type > of hard drive & other hardware that one has? If so, is there any kind of > equasion or theory behind determining what is the best amount to provide for > the best performance? > > Is there such a thing as a swap partition that is too large? How much swap you need depend on how much RAM you have and the memory requirements of the programs you run. The general rule of thumb is that swap should be twice as large as the amount of physical RAM in the machine. The idea behind that rule is that if you have less than that you risk running out of swap and if you need more swap than that your machine is probably going to swap so much that it will slow down to a standstill. This might be adjusted up or down depending on various things. For example if you have very little memory you might want a larger swap partition so that you can handle temporary amounts of large memory usage. (Running out of swap is Not Fun.) If you have a lot of RAM on the other hand you might not need any swap at all. The only downside of creating a large swap-partition is that that portion of the disk is no longer usable for files. I think there are limits to how much swap one can have configured but I think that limit is somewhare around the 20-30 GB mark. -- Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message