Swap Space

brando56894 · 2010-01-09 08:51:18

I've always been confused with whether I needed swap space if I have a lot of RAM. Over the past few years I've never really used swap space since I've always noticed that linux will usually uses about 400 or so mb (max of a gig) out of my 2gb and was wondering if it was actually beneficial to make swapspace even though my ram is never really saturated.

sHyLoCk · 2010-01-09 08:56:41

No it's not needed. If you use suspend or do memory intensive work then swap is needed, else skip it.

tomk · 2010-01-09 09:04:16

And remember you can always set up a swapfile if you find that you need swap - you don't have to use a separate partition.

brando56894 · 2010-01-09 09:23:39

Thanks for the info guys, I appriciate it.

lucke · 2010-01-09 10:31:28

Not all allocated memory is really used after start up or is only used very rarely. If your system is using 400 MB of memory, I estimate around 100 MB could be swapped out without any perceived functional degradation - you gain 100 MB for caches. Your call.

brando56894 · 2010-01-09 18:22:41

I have 3 tbas in firefox open, thunderbird,akkregator, ktorrent, konqueror, superkaramba and a few other programs open and theyre only using a total of 607mb.

[bran@ra ~/downloads]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2008       1936         71          0        775        554
-/+ buffers/cache:        607       1401

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-09 08:51:18

Swap Space

#2 2010-01-09 08:56:41

Re: Swap Space

#3 2010-01-09 09:04:16

Re: Swap Space

#4 2010-01-09 09:23:39

Re: Swap Space

#5 2010-01-09 10:31:28

Re: Swap Space

#6 2010-01-09 18:22:41

Re: Swap Space

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