Memory upgrade and swap partition size

[Bill Sconce]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:26:14 -0400
kclark at elbrysnetworks.com (Kevin D. Clark) wrote:

> 
> Bill Sconce writes:
> 
> > One morning after a sufficient number of cups of coffee it dawned on me what
> > was wrong:  that the "2X" rule was fatal for a 384MB machine and my greedy
> > use of Firefox tabs.  I took a deep breath, wiped the disk, created a 2GB
> > swap file and reinstalled.  It NEVER stalls now -- the first week or so I
> > had to keep pinching myself how well the poor thing worked with "enough"
> > memory at last.  And how dumb I'd been to ever credit "2X".  An old wives'
> > tale...
> 
> Suggestion:  you might not have needed to re-install.  If you had
> created an extra swapfile with "mkswap" and then utilized it with
> "swapon", you could have experimented with a larger amount of
> swap-space without having to re-partition/re-install.


Righty you are.  Thanks for pointing that out, Kevin.  (Kevin is pointing
out that "mkswap" can use a _file_ as well as the more usual arrangement,
a partition.)  That way if the extra swap space doesn't help in a particular
case you could back it out -- or  re-partition only after determining that
the extra swap space was going to help.

Good catch.

-Bill