On 20/11/11 19:33, Leigh Sharpe wrote:
I'm about to set up a new linux box, but not all of the bits have arrived yet. I currently only have 512MB of RAM in the machine, but ultimately, it will have at least 2GB, possibly 4.
er, RAM is now $10/GB. I see no reason for using anything less then 8 or 16. Two of my three laptops have 8GB (both T410's, it's the most they'll do), the last is my occasional mac which only has 2GB (can take 4, but it's due for replacement). My desktops one has 12, one 24 (both are triple channel Intel machines). My personal servers are all at 8GB as they're older machines (except for a HP MicroServer used as a NAS which I've yet to upgrade from 1GB).
If I let the installer do it's own thing with HDD partitioning, it will set up a swap size of 2 x RAM. But that's not what I want. 2 x the current amount of RAM will be inadequate once I install more. So, if I set up 8GB of swap, expecting that I'll eventually have 4GB of RAM, is having too much swap going to be a problem in the meantime? Is there a downside to having a large amount of swap?
For the last few years I've gone to using a flat 2GB of swap. My theory is that hard drives are *so* slow (at 100MB/sec that's 20sec to fill it) that you'd much rather services be killed by the OOM killer then wait minutes for a response (when you're fairly likely just to need to kill it anyway). This is for laptops, desktops and servers (and several hundred of them at my last job were built this way).