Re: Considerations before you install
Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 1:18 pm
I have had LMDE installed on my laptop since it went live. At the time, it had 2 gigs of memory. LMDE is on a small Linux partition (32 gigs total), and my swap partition is 3 gigs.tdockery97 wrote:The swap is not influenced by the kernel. Swap on one hand is a holdover from the days when computers had a small amount of random access memory. On the other hand, if you wish to hibernate your computer instead of turning it off, swap is necessary to hold the work you were doing in your last session. If you have lots of RAM and don't plan on using suspend/hibernate then it's up to you whether to keep or remove the swap partition.
A few months ago, I installed 4 gigs of RAM. I did not re-partition - still have 3 gigs dedicated to the swap.
The beginning of this thread indicates to double your memory for the swap, but not go over 4 gigs. If I were to hibernate, I would kill running applications. Given my 32 gigs dedicated to Linux, am I perfectly fine to maintain 3 gigs for the swap? It sounds like it's a waste of space these days to dedicate a lot of room to the swap (especially if you are pressed for space). It even sounds like I could do less (say, 2 gigs without issue).
Also, I have 4 gigs of memory, but on-board/integrated (Intel) graphics. Would you install the 32-bit (pae kernel) or the 64 bit?
Thanks
Edit: tdockery97, never mind. I re-read it. 2 gigs would be plenty (and more than what's needed for 32-bit). Lots of RAM requires a small swap.
3) Swap partitions don't need to be any larger than 2X your system ram. And, the sum of system ram and swap shouldn't exceed 4 Gig. If it does, reduce the swap partition size to get back to 4 Gig. or less. If you have 4 Gig. of ram on a 32 bit system like Mint, make a very small swap partition anyway, as the kernel expects to have a swap partition available. Not having a swap partition slows the kernel down in certain situations. For this purpose, there is no need for the swap partition to be over 256 KB at most.