Re: [cobalt-users] Memory upgrade - any additional steps?

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gerald Waugh wrote:

> Are you sure of that Jeff?
> The utilities on the RaQ indicate that swap size changes when you add more
> memory, yet the hd swap partition does not change.

The swap memory has nothing to do with the swap partition.  When the
swap memory is filled linux (and unix as well) starts using whatever
partition space that's available.  That's it, plain and simple.  Swap
memory is configured dynamically.  Swap space on the hard drive is
hardly ever used on todays systems with lots of memory, and RaQs with
any amount of memory all have the same size swap partition.  I don't
recall whether swap files are used before swap partitions are vice versa
(and yes, in some of my answers I use the terms interchangeably, since
most systems have one or the other).  But it really doesn't matter if
you have enough memory; most of us NEVER want to swap anything out; it
slows down our RaQ way too much.

Here's how one of my system drives is partitioned according to df:

 [admin admin]$ df
 Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
 /dev/hda1               743466    491655    251811  66% /
 /dev/hda3               198601     22039    176562  11% /var
 /dev/hda4             11151559   3569766   7581793  32% /home

And here's how much Swap memory I have according to free:

 [admin admin]$ free
              total       used       free     shared    buffers    
cached
 Mem:        257636     250708       6928     711004      97080     
50120
 -/+ buffers/cache:     103508     154128
 Swap:       131532       9500     122032

Since partition hda2 isn't listed as available space, my guess is that
it's the swap partition, and that it's roughly 128 megabytes.

Just for the heck of it, I just checked some other distributions I have
laying around the house: turbolinux workstation pro 6.1 recommends a
swap size of 128 megabytes no matter how much memory you have, and
concerning Slackware 3.5, Patrick Volkerding (the author/maintainer of
Slackware Linux) writes:

"How large to make this partition depends on how much free space you
think you can give up on your hard drive. For the purposes of this
chapter, we'll devote 10MB to swap space."

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net, P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: +1 909 778-9980  *  fax: +1 909 548-9484