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