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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