Let me pose the RAM question in another way to see if it can elicit a generic, "rule-of-thumb" response this way. If a person uses their computer as a sort of personal workstation using a fairly recent distro and requires that it have an Xwindows gui, using applications like web browsers, email clients, wordprocessing software and maybe Gimp on occassion, at what point would such a person need to have a swap partition? In other words, can it be stated in somewhat generic terms "if said user had less than X MB RAM, they will definitely need a swap partition"? And what about guidelines for swap partition size in such a case: can such be stated as well? Like, say, "if this individual has only 32 MB RAM, he should have a 64 MB swap partition" or "if he has 64 MB RAM he'll only need a 64 MB swap partition"?
Thanks, James >===== Original Message From Chuck Gelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ===== >Ditto to what Ray said. > > Perhaps you could run your system with a 'swap file' and see >how big it ever gets. Then make a swap partition just that size >or a little larger. ;-) > > My current firewall-router (aDSL to 100 Mb LAN) has 32 megabytes > of RAM and has not used any swap memory, AFAICR. > Another workstation with 64 M of RAM has used 3 M of swap. > Another workstation with 160 M of RAM has used 2 M of swap. > Another laptop with 16 M of RAM, XFfree86 v4.0.3, and I just > ran Netscape v4.77 under fvwm95, loaded a small web page, > has used 2.6 M of swap. > > IMHO, it depends. ;-) > >HTH, Chuck > >Ray Olszewski wrote: >> >> At 01:15 PM 12/8/02 +0000, Rolf Edlund wrote: >> >Originally to: james niland >> > >> > >> > jn> I know some people who run happily without a swap at all. >> > >> >How low RAM can I use, without running a swap ? Can I for example >do it on >> >a 486 >> >with 4 MB RAM ? >> >> The way you ask this question, it has no real answer. How little >memory a >> system can run with depends on what tasks it is doing. And the >choice of >> CPU is pretty much irrelevant to this question (its only slight >relevance >> is in the smaller size of CPU-specific kernels). >> >> That said ... running any sort of Linux system in less than 8 MB of >real >> (not swap) RAM poses special challenges ... most modern distros >can't even >> install on such systems (only Slackware, I think, still offers a >"low >> memory" install option) and you won't be able to do much with such >a >> system. In practice, the smallest systems I've ever run without >swap were >> 486s with 16 MB of RAM, and that was for special purpose systems >like >> routers. While these days I routinely run my workstations without a >swap >> partition, they have at least 256 MB of RAM. >> >> -- >> -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the >odds!"-------- >> Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo >> Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- >> >- >To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in >the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] >More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html >Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
