[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Ken Bloom]

On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 11:15 -0700, Bob Scofield wrote:
> I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like 
> Vista.  I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux.
> 
> I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for:
> 
> /
> /home
> swap
> 
> My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB.

I would be inclined towards *very* little swap, perhaps 1GB max no
matter how excessively large your RAM is. (Do use less than 1GB if you
have less RAM though.) My rationale is that by the time I get to 1GB of
RAM swapped out to disk, the whole computer has gotten so slow and
unworkable that at that point I'd really prefer to have the
out-of-memory process killer give me back control of my machine. (And
the OOM process killer can do so far more easily than I can start an X
term, find a PID and run `kill`)

I haven't actually done as little as 1GB yet, but my workstation has 4GB
of RAM and 2 GB of swap and works fine. (I don't think it's ever stored
anything in the swap space since I bought it, but I've only owned it for
about a month now.)

(Note that if you want suspend to disk, you will need at least as much
swap as you have RAM to store the RAM image over the reboot.)

--Ken

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