How do I calculate a SWAP partition?

Posted by Dean Howell on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Dean Howell
Published on 2012-06-24T01:31:34Z Indexed on 2012/06/24 3:24 UTC
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swap

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ram

Since the late 90s I've always understood that it is best practice to allocate twice the amount of physical RAM as swap space.

I just received my new laptop in the mail and it came with 6GB of RAM. In a separate order I had 16GB of RAM to replace the preinstalled. I didn't have the right torx driver to get to the RAM in this machine, so I installed Ubuntu and manually set a 16GB partition for swap. 32GB seemed a tad excessive...

Did I make the right choice? Would my machine perform better if there was no SWAP at all?

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