Swap Partition Size ?

[John]

I recently experimented  (unsuccsessfully) with the Beta version of Pardus, I have now reinstalled 2009.2.
However I have been left with the disk partitoned as follows-:

Root    -      16.39 GiB

Swap   -        7.81 MiB

Home  - remainder

So - My question is

1) Do I need a swap partition  (I have 2 Gib of Ram) ?
2) If I need it should it be as big as the Ram ?
3) If I have to alter it can I do so without losing any files ?
4) Should I Increase the Root size ?

[atolboo]

1) Do I need a swap partition  (I have 2 Gib of Ram) ?

This depends on what you are going to do. (I also have 2GB RAM)
And when I open a large image file (15MB jpg file) in Gimp, ~ 50MB of the 2GB remains free.
This can be monitored in System > KInfoCenter > Memory. (or use widget System Load Viewer)
And when I am going to do some manipulation ( and for instance start Firefox at the same time or some other stuff), it's highly likely that some swap space is going to be used.

2) If I need it should it be as big as the Ram ?

So it's very difficult to give a 100% good answer on this subject.

3) If I have to alter it can I do so without losing any files ?

You can change the partitioning without losing any files.
But there is always a change that things will go wrong. There is NO guarantee.

4) Should I Increase the Root size ?

Increasing the Root    -      16.39 GiB doesn't make much sense.

Changing the partitioning can be done with the Partition Editor (=GParted 0.7.0) of Parted Magic 5.7.
To change the partitioning, the disk (affected partitions) shouldn't be active.
And to achieve this non-active disk, boot the computer from an USB (or CD) version of  Parted Magic 5.7 and use the Partition Editor.

[John]

Thanks 

[SW]

In Windows world there was one simple role existing:

RAM of machine x 2 = suggested min. SWAP size


I don´t know if this is also valid for Linux, but with close 8GB You are imho surely on the safe side 

[James T]

1) Do I need a swap partition  (I have 2 Gib of Ram) ?
2) If I need it should it be as big as the Ram ?

Although in principle you don't, there are things that run better if you have one even if they fit into real memory. I'm not sure why, maybe some pseudo-filesystems actually try to write into the swap space.

Swap size == Memory size is the "traditional" value (although in the 2.2 kernel era there was a time when swap <= memory was useless this is no longer true [nor was it for 2.0.x and I don't go back to the 1.x kernels]) however with the larger real memory available these days it's probably not necessary to have that much. I'd suggest that a 1Gb swap partition is a reasonable size (I've not had any issues with 1Gb on systems ranging from a netbook with 1Gb RAM all the way up to a 24Gb compute server).

Also remember Seymour Cray's reason for not putting virtual memory on his computers: "If you haven't got it you haven't got it".

[atolboo]

Although in principle you don't, there are things ........

Well you will definitely need swap space if you are going to hibernate (sleep to disk) your computer.
And swap space can be created on a separate partition or an already existing partition.
To find out more about this subject, do a search with "create swap space" on the internet