On Jun 1, 2004, at 5:40 PM, Bob Bernstein wrote:
> I have a system with 512M ram and 255M swap and I _still_ seem to
> inevitably gobble almost all of the latter. I tend to run a lot of
> stuff.

At a minimum, you want to allocate more swap space than you have 
physical memory, so that the system can perform a crash dump if it 
panics.  At more point, the recommendation was to allocate twice as 
much swap space, but such a rough guideline should be adjusted 
according to your circumstances.

> Is there a way to inspect which processes at any given moment are
> having recourse to swap space?

Run top and sort by VSZ is a good starting point.  More specificly, 
processes which have a big difference between RSS and VSZ generally are 
using lots of swap, but the situation can be more complicated to 
understand in the face of shared memory...

-- 
-Chuck