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BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

1 edit

BlitzenZeus to aurgathor

Premium Member

to aurgathor

Re: How much space is needed for a Linux install?

If you allow them to install automatically they'll make a swap partition the same size as your physical memory, and honestly it's a waste. Manually partitioning I give maybe 512MB for a swap just to have one, but I haven't seen it used ever. You can also resize the partitions to make the swap smaller afterwards too.

The install I have on a small usb drive with no /home is taking up near 5GB alone with only a few programs installed, and here you can see I made the swap much smaller than the 8GB it would have been on this system.



Fraoch
join:2003-08-01
Cambridge, ON
SmartRG SR808ac
TP-Link EAP225
Grandstream HT502

Fraoch

Member

said by BlitzenZeus:

If you allow them to install automatically they'll make a swap partition the same size as your physical memory, and honestly it's a waste. Manually partitioning I give maybe 512MB for a swap just to have one, but I haven't seen it used ever. You can also resize the partitions to make the swap smaller afterwards too.

The install I have on a small usb drive with no /home is taking up near 5GB alone with only a few programs installed, and here you can see I made the swap much smaller than the 8GB it would have been on this system.

OT: a nice little program - swapspace.

»pqxx.org/development/swapspace/

If swap is needed, it creates a swap file that grows and shrinks dynamically.

It's best if you're not RAM-limited and won't be using swap much because the result is slower than a dedicated swap partition, but when it does kick in I don't even notice it.

Best of all, the program requires no configuration whatsoever if you install off prebuilt packages for your distro.

Also set swappiness to a low value (say 10) so that swap is only used when it's absolutely necessary:

»www.linode.com/wiki/inde ··· appiness

nwrickert
Mod
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL

nwrickert to BlitzenZeus

Mod

to BlitzenZeus
said by BlitzenZeus:

If you allow them to install automatically they'll make a swap partition the same size as your physical memory, and honestly it's a waste.

If you plan to hibernate your system, you need the swap partition to be big enough for a memory dump. If you will never hibernate, and have a decent amount of memory, you can probably do without any swap.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

I've seen conflicting reports about having one, and not having one. I know you could run without one, however at least by default on the usb drive install I have above it left a little over 6GB free on the drive for the os after the swap was created. Fedora basically refused to install to that drive for example, wanting something that was at least 20GB.