[plug] Partitioning Hard Disk

[William Kenworthy]

2xRAM for swap is a rule of thumb - for instance, it is easy to make
gnumeric use nearly 2G of memory/swap with large spreadsheets!  Some
other programs can be equally hungry (gimp, when trying to edit/overlay
2 134Mbyte tiff files, or gnuplot with some multi-megabyte plot files I
have).  vmware is another that can use a lot of memory if you set it up
that way.  Not uncommon.  (dell laptop, 512Mram, 512Mswap partition, 1G
swap file: started with 256M ram, desperately needs a large swap
partition)

Slow once you hit a large swap, but it works.  Note that you can have a
"swap file" around for mounting in emergencies - even slower, but again,
it works! - if you get to mount it in time!  Also multiple swap
partitions can be used, and if setup right on different disks can give a
raid 0 like speedup - was noticable when I did this at home (750M ram,
2x1G swap partitions on different disks).

If you dont do any of those things, rule of thumb is fine, but, if you
have the disk space, make at least 1G of swap for general use and you
wont regret it if the worst occurs - the 2x is a compromise from the
days when disk space was expensive.  As I have found out, it is hard to
repartition later, so better to do it right from the start.

What happens when you run outa swap: first gets very slow as it trawls
through memory looking for space, then in some cases total lockout
(gnumeric, reset required), in others, the app will come to a stop
(gnuplot) and can be killed.

BillK

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 21:50, Shayne O'Neill wrote:
> One rule of thumb I've heard is Memory size x2 , so for a 256 meg machine,
> 500meg swap.
>