how much memory should I dedicate to swap files?

[jbslow]

I was talking to a buddy and he wanted my to install Cashman and change my vitual memory and adjust the amount of memory my OS dedicates to swap files , he swears this will increase my systems performance but I wasnt totally hearing him.

Can someone explain these memory setting to me and maybe give me some valid suggestions?

OS-2Kpro
memory-1 256 meg stick of pc2100 Crucial DDR

 

[ken257]

First when we refer to vitual memory it means hard drive space not ram. When you are running programs and all your system memory gets used up the machine can use hard drive space as extra memory. As you can immagine when this happens things slow to a crawl because the hd is much slower then memory. About the best thing you can do to improve virtual memory is to defrag your hd also the swap file can be moved to a different drive then what your system runs from if you have more then 1 hd. However the ultimate sollution is to just use enough ram so that virtual memory never has to be used and with todays ram prices there is no reason not to do this.

 

[jbslow]

Alright thanks Ken. I havent really noticed my system slow down since the 2Kpro install so I guess 256 megs will do for now.

 

[JigPu]

A rule of thumb I learned from a Virtual Memory guide.

Set your virtual memory to however much you actually use. Rounded up to the nearsest hundred.

Basically run everything that you would normaly run simultaniusly with a few added programs "just in case". Use system monitor to check out how much virtual memory is being used, and follow the rule. That's how my system is set up.

JigPu

 

[typhoonmike]

No need to use Cacheman really I don't think. All those settings you can change on your own really. Just have to search around the web for information about the stuff and what to change. A rule of thumb I've seen is to set your swap file to 1 1/2 to 2 times the size of your RAM. So if you have 256megs of RAM then you would set your swap file to 512. Of course I think thats a lot of wasted space if you are using a permanent swap. Of course you are also talking about Vcache and that's a bit different. I'd just do a search on google for sites talking about that stuff.