I think you'll find the formula dated to the time when most people
said "I really need my total memory address space to be n megabytes,
but I can only possibly afford n/3 megabytes of RAM, so I have to just
make do with 2n/3 being on a relatively slow hard disk."

This certainly applied when I maxed out my first PC, a 486/33 with
8MB RAM back in 1993 [1]. Just being able to run 16MB of RAM+swap
using SLS [2] was heaven. I could have allocated more swap but I could
only afford a 210MB hard disk (and I reckon adding any more swap would
have been pretty much been counter-productive.).

Regards, Martin

[1] For those of you into Linux nostalgia, I actually posted a
question on one of the NNTP newsgroups on how to share my Linux swap
space with Windows 3.1. (Google groups has the memory of an elephant
- 
http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.os.linux.help/browse_thread/thread/7f6d399f350a6eee/710993141162f89b?lnk=st&q=martin.m.c.visser+linux&rnum=1#710993141162f89b
)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System


On 2/22/07, Howard Lowndes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Michael Chesterton wrote:
> Peter Hardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:24 +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote:
>>> It's recommended that your swap space should be 2x your RAM.  In your
>>> case it's .2x
>> Has anybody seriously made such a recommendation this millenium?
>
> early 2.4 kernels, linus, alan, rik, etc, said at least double the
> swap was needed, especially with big uptimes. It changed somewhere in
> 2.4 where it was no longer needed, but I think people like red hat
> took a while before they trusted and used the new code.

A default FC install still uses the 2x formula so I guess there must
still be some relevance.

--
Howard.
LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people <http://lannetlinux.com>
When you want a computer system that works, just choose Linux;
When you want a computer system that works, just, choose Microsoft.
--
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