Why has my swap pager gone nuts?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Apr 08), Borgmaster said:
> On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Alexander Haderer wrote:
> > At 15:30 08.04.2003 +0200, Borgmaster wrote:
> > >When I try this, X is disabled but some daemons are running, such
> > >as Samba, ntpd, linux emulation, etc. Top reports ~430Mb free. I
> > >have 512Mb RAM in the machine and 256Mb swap partition. I know
> > >that one is supposed to have twice swap as physical RAM, but is
> > >that really necessary on my single user workstation? 1.5G of total
> > >memory is twice the memory I have in some other servers...
> >
> > Where does this 1.5G come from? I see 512MB RAM +256MB swap.
> 
> 1.5G if I would have 512RAM + twice that in swap. Seems overkill to me...

The 2x swap suggestion was made back in the days when you only had 64M
or 128M of RAM.  If you are running a -current machine, or ever want to
be able to diagnose problems on -stable, you want at least much swap as
RAM so you can generate crashdumps.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com