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Apart from using up too much disk space, how much swap space can you allocate before it will degrade performance or cause problems on an x64 OS? What differences are there between the x64 OSes? I'm not talking used swap space, just telling the OS use x much for swap.

I get sick of the problems associated with dynamically changing the swap size, and I don't want to run out. Plus I'm the type of user who has a lot of things open simultaneously even if they are large programs, eg. right now I have 12 chrome windows probably averaging 10 tabs per window, plus my other running programs including firefox.

Edit: Maximums allocated with no performance loss or errors so far

  • RAM Multiplier: 4x Unknown OS
  • Maximum GB: 128 GB Unknown OS
BeowulfNode42
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2 Answers2

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Having 2gb,4gb,8gb, or more will not degrade performance. Using it will.

Your memory is 2000mb/s or higher, and your swap file is 60-100mb/s (unless you have a ssd). Anytime you depend on your swap file because you ran out of real memory slows down whatever programs are using it.

If you have 8gb or more windows will swap small amounts out over time and it won't affect performance. However, if you have 8gb of RAM and a program need 16gb now half of your RAM is in the slow lane and that program will run slower because of it. At 2+ times over the limit windows will constantly be trying to swap things in and out of memory and everything will be slow.

cybernard
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No amount of swap space is too much, although I wouldn't go over 4 times RAM. They recommend 2 times RAM, but as I had already used that and found it wanting, I used 4 times RAM as the sizing for swap on my machine with 32GB of RAM which resulted in a swap space of 128GB. So far I have seen no need to increase it.

Dan D.
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