Confusion over size of swap partition

G'day all.
Will repartition HDD when I replace 6.5 with 7.0 to create a separate home partition. The handbook for 7.0 recommends the size of the swap partition to be double that of your RAM, but no larger than 1Gb.
I have a recent laptop with 2Gb of RAM. My swap partition is currently set to 4Gb which was based on my reading at that time. Subsequently found the most common recommendations of swap size to be half of RAM, equal to RAM and twice size of RAM. One recommendation even stated that the swap partition is probably not necessary in these days of large RAM.

Would someone be kind enough to point me in the direction of an appropriate size for a swap partition? Many thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Miles

My two rappen, er, cent: http://penguin.ch/dokuwiki/doku.php/...emarks_on_swap

[wireman]

All the recommendation you mention are all accurate.

It really depends on what your usage is like, but for a general purpose machine with a good amount of RAM (1Gb or more), then the Mepis recommendation is the one I'd go for.

The only caveat I'd mention is that if you're on a laptop and want suspend/hibernate to work you need swap to be a least as big as your RAM.

[cookdav]

Since most my machines now have 1GB (or more) of RAM and I do
NOT care about suspend/resume on my laptop (which has 512MB),
I've NEVER been creating any separate partition for 'swap', for
MEPIS. And, I've NOT had any problems.

[A few OTHER distros, such as pure Debian, brow-beat you during
installation into THINKING you need 'swap', but once installed,
it hasn't seemed to exhibit any problems without a 'swap' partition.]

So, you can see why there's so much seemingly contradictory
'lore' about whether to bother with it or not.

My 2-cents worth...
Dave

[joany]

According to the system monitor widget I use on the desktop, Swap was occasionally used when my 2GB RAM maxed out. After I installed 4GB RAM, that no longer happens. So with 2GB of RAM, I'd allocate a smallish Linux swap partition, maybe 512MB or so, just to be safe.

[Jimmy Johnson]

Think about it...The more RAM you have the less swap you use.

[Stevo]

I've actually found that the system is intelligent when suspending to disk--only the memory in use is written to a file in the swap partition. An intelligent implementation in Linux--who would have guessed? So if you have 4GB, the swap doesn't have to be 4GB to get hibernate to work...It depends on much RAM you expect to have in use.

[lucky9]

I've read (somewhere) that there was a 2 gig limit. Like all things that's probably changed by now! Soooo.....

I set mine with one gig and don't worry about it.

With the price of hard disk space today why worry?

[timkb4cq]

I usually set my swap to 640 Mb because "640 is enough for anybody"

[fbt]

Originally Posted by timkb4cq

I usually set my swap to 640 Mb because "640 is enough for anybody"

timbk4cq you must me an old timer. like me! My laptop has 512meg and I just use the default install which is no swap drive or it's in a temp directory somewhere. I don't really know but never had problems with laptop suspend.