swap sizing

[Bruce Evans]

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> On Tuesday, 31 May 2005 at 13:35:38 +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 May 2005, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday, 31 May 2005 at 11:48:19 +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 30 May 2005, Ken Gunderson wrote:
>>>>> And of course that you need at least as much swap as ram if you
>>>>> want to get a full dump...
>>>>
>>>> Of course not.  The dump can be written to any disk device that you
>>>> don't care about overwriting.
>>>
>>> Sure.  And, apart from swap, what would that be?  Why not use it
>>> for swap while you're not dumping to it?
>>
>> Because if swap is configured than it might be used.
>
> Well, I said "use", not "configure".

If it is configured, then its use will be decided by the vm system.  I
think I know better than the vm system whether its use is useful on
my systems.  The vm system can only adjust for transient loads better
but I think I have enough memory for transients to not be a problem.
(I normally have hundreds of MB to spare and this gets used for disk
caching; transiently it is used for programs and the disk cache gets
depleted a bit.)

Bruce