Memory, swap, and limits

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 09:56:25 -0400,
  James Kosin <jkosin at beta.intcomgrp.com> wrote:
>>   
> Having TOO much swap space can be a detriment and not an asset.   
> Usually, the rule of thumb I go by is allocate about 2x the amount of  
> physical memory installed on the system; for machines with < 1M.  This  
> number will need to approach more or less 1x for machines with 1-2M.   
> With machines with > 2M; I'm not sure swap space will make much of a  
> difference, unless you rely on X heavily.

Presumably you mean Gigabytes above as there haven't been desktop machines
with memory on the order of 1 megabyte in about 15 years.

There are other factors in this. If you turn off overcommit you need to
have swap space available to back memory that may be allocated but not
really being used. So rules of thumb using ratios may not always be
applicable.