[ILUG] Thoughts on USB as swap space

[Niall O Broin]

On 1 Jan 2008, at 12:58, Frank Murphy wrote:

> Niall O Broin wrote:
>> On 1 Jan 2008, at 12:25, Colm Buckley wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/1/08, Frank Murphy <frankly3d.weblists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Thinking on the other crowds MaleSheepSpeederUpper idea,
>>>> during install could a usb stick be designated as swap?
>>>> If so can you use up say the full 4gb or whatever size is involved?
>>>
>>> Theoretically, yes, but I'd be inclined to think of this as a bad  
>>> idea in
>>> practice -
>>
>> What Colm said, in spades But also, you specifically mentioned  
>> "during install". On anything like a modern machine you should  
>> have more than enough memory to do an install without needing swap  
>> (during the install, that is).
>
> I meant to say "specify usb" during install\setup., but as it's not  
> a runner, basically mute.
> As I will be running MS Win 3D apps using Crossover Linux.
> How much swap should be needed\(is it really need) say with a P4  
> duo-core-quad, possibly min 4gb ddr2 ram.

How much swap is needed is an easy calculation:

swap space = required memory space - physical memory


The tricky part is figuring out the value of "required memory space" :-)

on a machine with 4GB of RAM, for desktop use, you probably hardly  
need any swap, but I'd give it 1GB just to have some.

> Should it go on a partition with the main os files usually hda 
> (0-9),  or separate physical drive hdb,c (0-9) etc.

If you were really using swap, you'd want it on a separate disk, as  
fast as possible, and on  a particular part of the disk to maximise  
access speed. Real world, for your usage, it's hardly going to matter.


Niall