Disk Partitioning, ULTRIX

[Mark Sausville]

In article <4306 at helios.ee.lbl.gov> envbvs at epb2.lbl.gov (Brian V. Smith) writes:

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   From: envbvs at epb2.lbl.gov (Brian V. Smith)
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   Date: 28 Nov 89 22:05:05 GMT
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   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 at 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 at media-lab.media.mit.edu             Cambridge, MA 02139