[LBo] Short list of common initial setup steps

[Jisao]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:40:58 -0400, Randy Kramer wrote
>    * When my swap usage grows to about 375 MB (I have 512 MB of RAM 
> and (now) 2 GB of swap), my system bogs down.  Get lots of "sewing 
> machine" activity on the hard drive and periods when the system 
> won't react.  At that point, I look for processes using the most 
> VIRT (maybe not the ideal way to choose), and kill and then restart 
> them.  (I have experimented with different settings of swappiness 
> but still typically leave the default setting of 60.  512 MB of RAM 
> is all I can put in this system--my next system will have space for 
> at least 2 GB.)

I am no specialist with Linux, but isn't there a way to create virtual swap?

I am reading "Ubuntu Hacks", and hack number 4 requires an insane amount of 
swap (5 Gig). There are instructions to set a temporary swap file inside 
the /tmp directory (it is assumed that there is available space in that 
partition):

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swap bs=1M count=5000

then:

sudo mkswap /tmp/swap
sudo swapon /tmp/swap


Would something like that improve things for you?

Jisao