Very Computer

I'm planning to put Linux on my P90 with 16 megs RAM, and I'm wondering
what a good swap partition size is. I'll have a 730 meg drive for Linux
to play around with, and I hope to be able to run Netscape and other
X/Windows resource hogs concurrently without bogging down the system too
much. Does anyone have any recommendations for the partition size? I'd
like to get this right the first time, as repartitioning without a tape
backup is a bit of a pain :)

Thanks!

(btw, the Yggdrasil in my finger info is not linux-related: perhaps I'll
have to change that now that I lurk here :)

I think the 'general' rule of thumb is: twice the amount of ram, or in
otherwords since you have 16 meg, a 32 meg swap partition.  Then again, this may
be way too much, or way too little.  It all depends on what and how you use your
system.  Btw, from what I've read in other threads regarding Linux's memory
management as it pertains to swapping, you *dont* want to rely  on its virtual
memory/page swapping mechanisms.  If you find your system is swapping too much,
get more memory!!

:

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:       The answer to life, the universe and everything, is...  
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Actually, you only need as much swap as you have ram.  I run 8 and 12
just because that is what worked out for my partitions.

--

________________       _____
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| I'm planning to put Linux on my P90 with 16 megs RAM, and I'm wondering
| what a good swap partition size is. I'll have a 730 meg drive for Linux
| to play around with, and I hope to be able to run Netscape and other
| X/Windows resource hogs concurrently without bogging down the system too
| much. Does anyone have any recommendations for the partition size? I'd
| like to get this right the first time, as repartitioning without a tape
| backup is a bit of a pain :)

There are three rules of thumb you may hear. The first is to have at
least as much swap as RAM, the 2nd is swap = largest prog + 10M -
RAM, and the third is not more than swap = 2x RAM.

If you want to have large programs you need lots of virtual memory,
but if you get the working set large (say 2x RAM) it will be very
slow. The one about at least as large as RAM comes from systems
which take core dumps to swap when they crash. Linux doesn't crash,
and doesn't dump if it did.

I have been running Linux for almost two years on a 16MB system with
no swap at all. I can compile the kernel and read news, and send
mail. I have never had a problem. I have Linux on a ThinkPad and did
a demo for the Upstate NY UNIX User's Group on HTML. I had X,
netscape, and the NCSA httpd all running in 12MB of RAM, and free
said no swap in use (I had 40M swap if I needed it). The bottom line
is that you can do useful stuff in small memory.

If you will be doing major stuff on this box, make the swap large.
Aim for 48M or so of RAM+swap. If you are tight on disk or have 32M
RAM you can go smaller. If this will just be a toy personal system,
24M is probably enough (see above for BIG stuff, though).

Just remember that your kernel must be below cyl 1024, think about
your disk layout. A 5M /boot partition low is not a bad idea on a
big disk.

Final word, disk is dirt cheap. I just got 850M Caviar for ~$185.
You can probably return enough deposit bottles for an upgrade if you
need it.