theheadlessrabbit's Journal: How big should my swap be?

For the last 10 years, I have been asking people more knowledgeable than I, "how big should my swap be?"
and the answer has always been "just set it to twice your RAM and forget about it".
In the old days, it wasn't much to think about, 128 megs of ram means 256 megs of swap.
Now that I have 4 gigs of RAM in my laptop, I find myself wondering, "is 8 gigs of swap really necessary?"

How much swap does the average desktop user really need?

Does the whole "twice your RAM rule still apply?
If so, for how much longer will it likely apply? or will it always apply?
or have i been consistently misinformed over the last 10 years?

You might not need any at all.

[Haeleth]

My Eee 901 has 1 GB of RAM and no swap. I haven't run into any problems yet, other than that obviously I'll need to do some fiddling about if I want to get it hibernating.

None

[bigtomrodney]

Swap really isn't needede the way it used to be. Hard disk performance is nothing like that of RAM. Thankfully if you haven't enough RAM to do the job the costs of upgrading are quite reasonable.

Now on the less general advice, if you have 4GB of RAM you really don't need any swap. If you are running an application that uses gigabytes of RAM such as a database then I'd go back to the argument that you need more RAM, not more swap.