Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]

“Old dumb memory managers

“I think the ‘2x swap space’ rule came from Old Solaris and
Windows admins. Also, earlier memory mangers were very badly
designed. There were not very smart. Today, we have very smart and
intelligent memory manager for both Linux and UNIX.

“Nonsense rule: Twice the size of your main system RAM for
Servers

According to OpenBSD FAQ:

“Many people follow an old rule of thumb that your swap
partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. This
rule is nonsense. On a modern system, that’s a LOT of swap, most
people prefer that their systems never swap. You don’t want your
system to ever run out of RAM+swap, but you usually would rather
have enough RAM in the system so it doesn’t need to swap.”

Complete
Story