> When I first installed Debian Sparc from the CD, I partitioned a Gig > of Swap space since I have half a Gig of Ram. The Slink kernel would
I have often seen this "rule of thumb" used in this way and I believe that it has long been misinterpreted. The rule that I am talking about is "you need at least twice the amount of swap space as you have RAM". I am pretty sure that the original interpretation of this rule was more along the lines of "determine how much memory you will need to run everything you need to run, then make sure that at least 1/3 of that is physical RAM". The intention here is a trade off between system performance and cost. Hardware has, however, progressed to a point where this rule is pretty much useless for normal systems. If you are running a machine with 512M of RAM, then you probably don't really need to configure any swap space at all unless the machine will need it for running a big database or some other memory hungry application. That 1G of swap space could be used for a much better purpose (like storing 1G of pron or mp3s.. hehe). If you ever really do need the extra memory, simple create a swap partition and use swapon as the need arises. Just my $0.02 (+10%GST) worth. Regards Michael Anthon
