Hibernation swap size

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chrispop99
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Hibernation swap size

#1 Post by chrispop99 »

Sorry to jump the gun with the revision to the manual taking place in sections, but I wanted to post this whilst I remembered.

IMHO our advice in the manual about swap size when using hibernation is inadequate. The link below contains a chart which perhaps we might adopt?

https://itsfoss.com/swap-size/

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richb
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Re: Hibernation swap size

#2 Post by richb »

Those recommendations seem excessive to me. But as the author of that article says opinions abound.
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chrispop99
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Re: Hibernation swap size

#3 Post by chrispop99 »

richb wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2019 2:47 pm Those recommendations seem excessive to me. But as the author of that article says opinions abound.
They seem a lot, certainly, but most users run with at least 4GB RAM, and our manual currently suggests something for hibernation on the order of 2GB. I would consider that to be very marginal; when running with a lot of browser tabs open, I get pretty close to 4GB RAM.

My comments here are prompted by a Facebook user with an encrypted install that fails to recover from hibernation with the pre-set 2GB RAM.

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Re: Hibernation swap size

#4 Post by richb »

I agree 2 GB is too low. The wiki says 1-1.5 times the size of installed memory. And MX Tweak>Other says swap should >= Ram. So we have conflicts.
As I recall the Installer when specifying install to complete disk defaults to 2 GB. That is too low. I installed to complete disk and have 2 GB swap. On my machine with 16 GB RAM I average around 3.5 Gig consumed so cannot hibernate if I wanted to.
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Stevo
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Re: Hibernation swap size

#5 Post by Stevo »

Doesn't hibernation compress the RAM image before writing it to the disk? If not by default, that can certainly be enabled when you run

Code: Select all

sudo dpkg-reconfigure uswsusp
plus it speeds up the read and write or the image.

There is also a setting for maximum image size, but hibernation will exceed it if it has to. The help hints are quite useful. I found that increasing this to 2000000000 bytes (2 GB) on my 16 GB system seems to get rid of the sometimes slow save and restore process...but I usually close down apps until I get below 1 GB RAM used before hibernating anyway, though sometimes I've forgotten and left heavy browsers running.

Did that facebook user get hibernation working if they increased the swap size? That's critical missing data. It just doesn't work on some machines no matter what you do.

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Gordon Cooper
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Re: Hibernation swap size

#6 Post by Gordon Cooper »

Chris You have only beaten the gun by a couple of days and this thread may well continue into next week.

I very rarely user hibernation but agree that 2 gb swap may be inadequate for the ever increasing size of memory and the temptation to
resultant temptation to work with many tabs open.
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