To swap or not to swap that is the question

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 07:57:02PM -0400, Greg Galperin wrote:
> I run multiple jobs on multi-gigabyte data sets.  I use over a
> gigabyte of swap 

Good point.  If one has several gigabytes of data and a program that
needs to use all that data, memory needs get big yet the working set
isn't necessarily as big as the data, so swap is useful.  And in your
case of the working set being half of RAM, running two at a time is
pretty cool.  And the swap usage would go way up.  Thanks for the post.

So, I'll change my answer.  Size your swap and your RAM to the
specifics of your problem.  If you can't characterize your problem
that well, then 256 MB is a good size, and bigger is OK too, it might
even be useful if in the future you have reason to deal with big
datasets.


-kb