Q about swap size

Patrick Bartek bartek047 at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 11 17:11:43 UTC 2010


--- On Sun, 7/11/10, Robert G. (Doc) Savage <dsavage at peaknet.net> wrote:

> I've been running Fedora on my old Thinkpad A22p (P-III/M w/512MB)
> since FC4 or before, upgrading from one version to the next using the 
> same partition sizes. For F13 I increased the size of /boot, but kept 
> swap at 1GB:
>
> # fdisk -l /dev/sda
> [snip]
>
>
> The last couple of releases have run agonizingly slowly with very high
> load averages (between 2.x and 10.x).
>
> I just read http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html
> /Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html
>
> which recommends a minimum of 2GB swap size for memory sizes up to 4GB.
> I've been using 2x RAM for swap size ever since the 2.6 kernel was
> introduced. At the moment (running 'yumex') 'top' indicates:
>
> [snip]

You need more RAM, not more swap.  512MB is not enough.  That's why the last few releases have been running progressively slower:  They're running out of RAM and hitting the swap.  If you can upgrade to 1 or, better, 2 or more GB RAM, your system will run much faster and won't need the swap as much.

My system (Athlon64 X2 2.7GB, 512MB swap--that's right MB!, F12-64-bit) has 4GB RAM and rarely uses the swap.

B


More information about the users mailing list