Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!mit-eddie!mit-amt!media-lab.media.mit.edu!saus From: saus@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Mark Sausville) Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix Subject: Re: Disk Partitioning, ULTRIX Message-ID: Date: 1 Dec 89 20:50:21 GMT References: <5001@buengc.BU.EDU> <2615@canisius.UUCP> <4306@helios.ee.lbl.gov> Sender: saus@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU Organization: /u/saus/.organization Lines: 46 In-reply-to: envbvs@epb2.lbl.gov's message of 28 Nov 89 22:05:05 GMT In article <4306@helios.ee.lbl.gov> envbvs@epb2.lbl.gov (Brian V. Smith) writes: Path: mit-amt!snorkelwacker!usc!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!helios.ee.lbl.gov!epb2.lbl.gov!envbvs From: envbvs@epb2.lbl.gov (Brian V. Smith) Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix Date: 28 Nov 89 22:05:05 GMT References: <5001@buengc.BU.EDU> <2615@canisius.UUCP> Sender: usenet@helios.ee.lbl.gov Reply-To: envbvs@epb2.lbl.gov (Brian V. Smith) Organization: lbl Lines: 31 Seems to me like you should set the size of the swap partition to whatever you need in virtual memory. Except to make sure that you have enough space in the g partition for /usr, it seems kind of silly to restrict swap space or waste disk space by having more than one needs just to follow some rule-of-thumb for sizing. _____________________________________ Brian V. Smith (bvsmith@lbl.gov) Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory I don't speak for LBL, these non-opinions are all mine. Which brings up a gripe of mine. Unless your root disk has a swap partition as large or larger than your physical memory, you can forget full crash dumps. It won't use your swap space on other disks to write the dump but merely truncate the dump to the size of the swap partition on the root disk. Unless I'm wrong. This is nasty because it's not what you're thinking about when you bring up a new system (hey, it won't crash, right?). By the way, speaking of rules of thumb, everyone seems to think that you ought to have greater that 2 times the physical memory size for swap space. Anyone have any authoritative knowledge on how this rule should be modified as physical memory increases. I have 128M in my machine and only 160M of swap space. This machine has never come close to running out of swap in over 6 months of hard use (> 64 users, timesharing, news, mail, editing, light program development, some image crunching, etc., etc.). Mark Mark Sausville MIT Media Laboratory Computer Systems Administrator Room E15-354 617-253-0325 20 Ames Street saus@media-lab.media.mit.edu Cambridge, MA 02139