> On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
>
> > Generally, your swap file size should be one of the following:
> >
> > (1) At least 64 megabytes.
> > (2) Three times your RAM size.
> > ... which ever is greater.
>
> Doesn't this depend quite a bit on what you do with the system? I have
> numerous boxes that have never come anywhere close to using 3x their RAM
> size in swap...and they run relatively well. On a shell server with 128mb
> RAM, do you really want to be one of the users when it gets 300+mb into
> swap?
Indeed heavy swapping on a server is often a very bad idea. On a desktop,
it's just the opposite, and you should be _very_ generous with swap space.
There are some applications like netscape, who use swap space as a
black hole chucking all radioactive waste generated by memory leaks :-)
Gabriel