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View Full Version : SWAP partition 16GB RAM needed or not ?



michal12
July 29th, 2015, 12:59 PM
Hi
I found good document about SWAP partition : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-ppc.html#id4394007

Do I need create SWAP partition ? This is standard PC with 16GB RAM - I use only 1 VM (with win..) and nothing special, and GNS3. I don't use hibernate. I asking because I have only 250 GB SSD drive.
If yes where do you recommend create SWAP partition on first or second partition ?

System: ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit

Thanks for help.
M.

howefield
July 29th, 2015, 01:27 PM
You'll probably find swap is so seldom used that you wonder why you have one, but it is probably best to maintain one for badly behaving applications, imo.

I have only 8GB of ram in this machine but have seen Libre Office and Virtualbox occasionally want to use swap even though there is plenty of real memory available. I keep swap on a mechanical disk separate from the SSD, but if that is not possible for you I'd probably put a 4GB (ish) partition on the SSD and turn down swappiness.

michal12
July 29th, 2015, 05:32 PM
Thanks for info.

If we speak about SWAP partition - where is recommendation to located SWAP partition ?
I create 3 partition:
- /
- /home
- <swap>

SWAP is recommended to create on beginning or end of SSD disk ?
This is SSD disk probably this is don't matter.

I create SWAP with recommendation 8GB.

Maybe what is your recommendation to disk 250GB ?

Thanks for help.
M.

howefield
July 29th, 2015, 05:52 PM
If we speak about SWAP partition - where is recommendation to located SWAP partition ?

I do not know if it matters on an SSD card where it is.

An interesting if a little old post/thread here you might be interested in..

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1937251&p=11746853&viewfull=1#post11746853

oldfred
July 29th, 2015, 06:04 PM
The argument on location on drive was about the difference in rotational speed of inner vs. outer tracks on hard drive. But SSD does not rotate. :)

But even the discussion of location on drive usually was not critical. And with the amount of RAM, you may never use swap. I agree with howefield's first post that having a little swap is often worthwhile, but not required.

I tend to make swap last on drive just to have it out of the way in case later I want to change partitions around. I use 2GB for new systems. My old system with 4GB of RAM never used swap, but I had 3GB of swap. I never hibernate, and do not do video editing which may be about the only application that would use swap or as much RAM as you can afford.