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renners1

Member

From: Thailand

Registered: 2004-11-03

Posts: 71

swap partition size

An imagemagick command I was running the other day failed due to out of memory. I have 512meg ram and a 256meg swap partition. Would increasing the size of the swap partition prevent this problem?

Isn't 256meg a bit small anyway? It's the recommended size but the command I was running wasn't something that I would think is too taxing!(I was trying to create a thumbnail index of some picture files).

Cheers, Renners

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iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Re: swap partition size

Are you referring to swap partition or /tmp? If it's /tmp then you can switch from tmpfs to a larger normal partition. If it's swap, then yeah, 256MB is a little bit small. Should be at least 512-768MB.

shadowhand

Member

From: MN, USA

Registered: 2004-02-19

Posts: 1,142

Website

Re: swap partition size

Usually you swap is twice the size of you RAM, unless you have a gig or more, in which case there's no reason (imho) to use swap.

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Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: swap partition size

I wouldn't say that.... eventually we'll have apps that don't fit in one gig of ram either, and extra swap space is good then too....... may as well prepare.

Dusty

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renners1

Member

From: Thailand

Registered: 2004-11-03

Posts: 71

Re: swap partition size

Thanks guys... I'll resize swap to 1gig and see if it makes a difference.

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Microsoft stole my computer, Linux gave it back.

elasticdog

Member

From: Washington, USA

Registered: 2005-05-02

Posts: 995

Website

Re: swap partition size

Swap space size recommendations are something that everyone seems to have their own opinion about.  When I first setup my system, I did a fair amount of reading, and most people recommend 2-3 times the amount of RAM you have...to a point.  I personally have 512MB of RAM in my system and set aside 2GB of swap space to be extra sure.  I was originally only going to set aside 1.5GB of swap, but figured I'd eventually upgrade to at least a 1GB of RAM and didn't mind the overkill.

Those plans changed and next week I'll actually be getting 2GB of RAM in the mail, and I'll just leave the swap space where it is.  Although that's a bit extreme, it should be future-proof...YMMV