I was just doing some reading and it seems there are some problems with VM in the 2.4 kernels that having 2x RAM for SWAP help.  I find this kind of funny, since we used to say that swap wasn't required for Linux if you had alot of RAM (ie more than 48MB).  Basically you need as much ram+swap as you will use and more won't hurt (unless you have limited harddrive space).

Dusty

> 
> I'll have to do some reading about that.  That is something new to me.  Sun used to tell us don't make swap more than 2x physical memory.  Something about a performance problem trying to address more memory that it had.  Where did you read that they recomend 2x ram for swap?
> 
> I have built several Linux and BSD systems with no swap at all (I think mandrake 8 didn't work) and they ran fine.  Reasoning, if I have 512MB ram and all I do is surf the web and write docs and such why do I need 512MB or more SWAP.  I could load the entire system into RAM and have room left.
> 
> > Linux kernel 2.4 REQUIRES swap to be twice your amount of RAM, or bad things
> > happen in medium/high load.  Linus and Alan Cox have repeated this mantra
> > over and over again.  I still don't know why they say so, but do it!  Also
> > keep in mind that the beginning of the hard drive is faster than the end, so
> > I always suggest making the swap partition at the very beginning of the
> > drive.
> > 
> > If the hard drive is less than 8GB, then you are probably fine making all
> > non-swap space into a big partition for Linux mounted as root "/".  However,
> > most older computers BIOS cannot handle LILO booting from a partition above
> > cylinder 1024, so if your hard drive is larger than 1024 cylinders (usually
> > 8GB in LBA access) then you will need a /boot partition below 1024
> > cylinders.  Win98 and 2000 has this same limitation when booting on x86
> > hardware.
> > 
> > If it is a single user system, I don't really care about performance and
> > filesystem fragmentation so I just put everything into one big /...
> > especially if the hard drive is small.
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Dusty" <dusty@sandust.com>
> > To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau@list.luau.hi.net>
> > Cc: <recipient list not shown:>
> > Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 3:24 PM
> > Subject: [luau] Partitioning *nix
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > >
> > > Typically make swap the same size as you RAM and no more than twice your
> > RAM.  You can use less swap if you will not be doing anything memory
> > intensive, but some systems won't run without a swap.
> > >
> > > If the system is going to be a server for anything then you should break
> > out /var.  Things like mail (/var/spool/mail), print server
> > (/var/spool/lpd), logs (/var/logs), http (/var/www/htdocs), etc.  The reason
> > you want to break this out is so /var doesn't fill up you / partition.  It
> > is possible that your system could get so many error messages (someone
> > trying to port scan) or so much mail from an overly active list or printing
> > a 5,000,000 page document that /var would comsune your entire harddrive.
> > When / runs out of space all kinds of wierd things can happen from not being
> > able to log in, the system crashing.  If you don't have a high traffic
> > server you won't need much space for /var (I have 32MB on my sparc5 for
> > logs, mail, and web and it stays 50%).  If my 32MB /var fills up oh well, I
> > just get more errors that the system can't write and I have to delete some
> > stuff, but my / is safe.
> > >
> > > Other partitions that could be useful to have are /usr and /opt and
> > /usr/home.  /usr is where most of you programs are stored (unless you are on
> > an old style system like Solaris or Suse who use /opt for optional
> > software).  /usr/home (or the like) is where your users keep their personal
> > files.  If you have a lot of users and don't use quotas bob could try and
> > download the latest .iso images for his five favorite distributions onto
> > your 500MB harddrive.  Again this would fill your / and bad things happen.
> > >
> > > What I typically do for my home systems is just / and swap (my girlfriend
> > is a *nix geek too).  On my home severs I create /, /var, and swap.
> > Productions servers in a data center really require you to look at what they
> > will be used for and partition them out for their specific job.
> > >
> > > Dusty
> > >
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> > >
> > >
> > 
> > 
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