Re: Memory question

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Matthew Hixson wrote:

> On Friday, June 27, 2003, at 01:17 PM, Jord Tanner wrote:
> > I've heard anecdotally that Linux has troubles if the swap space is
> > less
> > than the RAM size. I note that you have 6G of RAM, but only 2G of swap.
>
> I've heard that too, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to me. If
> you get to the point where your machine is _needing_ 2GB of swap then
> something has gone horribly wrong (or you just need more RAM in the
> machine) and it will just crawl until the kernel kills off whatever
> process causes the swap space to be exceeded. Seems to me that you
> should only have that much swap if you can't afford more RAM or you've
> tapped out your machine's capacity, and your application needs that
> much memory.

This was an artifact in older kernels where the swap code didn't work
right unless it had as much swap as memory. I'm pretty sure that was
fixed long ago in the 2.4 series.