[ale] On swap space (was Re: who is eating my drive)

The Don Lachlan ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org
Tue May 31 15:40:31 EDT 2011


On 05/31/2011 03:29 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> On the extended/primary stuff - I wasn't saying it couldn't be done
> (clearly it WAS done) but rather that I didn't see a reason for doing it
> and can think of reasons not to do it.

Sure. I was trying to point out it may not have been a decision he made 
but a default that the installer did for him.

What would be your reasons not to do it?

-L

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of The
> Don Lachlan
> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 3:18 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] On swap space (was Re: who is eating my drive)
>
> On 05/31/2011 02:28 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
>> I have never heard anything that says swap can't be on a primary disk
>> partition and am pretty sure I've done that in the past. However,
> these
>
> In a physical system, swap should be a primary partition, specifically
> the FIRST partition. Why? Because the first partition is closest and has
>
> fastest access. I forget which distro I marked in the Do Not Use column
> because it wouldn't allow me to partition that way - it would quietly
> move the swap partition after the boot partition.
>
>> *From:*ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] *On Behalf Of
>> *Narahari 'n' Savitha
>>
>> I have 8GB of Memory allocated to this VMWare session.
>> I may not need almost any swap at all.
>
> The classic rule is swap space should be 2x your physical RAM; this was
> so that in a crash, the system could dump it's memory to swap and still
> have 1x RAM to boot. Linux does not require swap space to run, so the
> latter is not an issue and I doubt you're going to be recovering crash
> dumps, so the first is also not an issue.
>
> Use as much swap as you think you may need; if you have the spare disk
> (disk is cheap), then I would use 1x RAM for swap. More than that should
>
> be unnecessary. As for minimum - 1GB of swap is usually sufficient.
>
>> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Lightner, Jeff<JLightner at water.com
>> <mailto:JLightner at water.com>>  wrote:
>>
>> SWAP device (/dev/sda5). (By the way you don't typically use Extended
>> partition until you run out of primaries - you could have made
> /dev/sda2
>> itself the swap device.
>
> I've seen an installer that defaulted to only two primary partitions,
> where the second holds the extended partitions. I'm not aware of a
> technical issue with this, though I find it ugly and don't use it.
>
> -L
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