The OP clearly states that he wants to know the earliest origin of the rule, and the only answers he gets are people giving their own opinions on how much swap space you should have.
Too bad because it's an interesting question that I would also like to know the answer to.
Nope. Those are not the only answers I am seeing. I’m still curious though. 2x was nice because nobody really questioned it. Now that we have there doesn’t seem to be one “answer”. This is a fun/interesting question that comes up every now and then here and elsewhere :-)
I suspect someone smarter than me about system tuning will have a much smarter and nuanced answer than “just use 2x”
I thought the modern advice was you don't need it at all. No more spinning disks, so the there's no speed gain using the inner-most ring, and modern OSes manage memory in more advanced, and dynamic ways. That's what I choose to believe anyway, I don't need anymore hard choices when setting up Linux :)
I'm the OP. I got myself into collecting falsehoods people believe about Linux swap and OOM[1]. There is an entry about this 2x rule in this collection, with my answer on how to select swap size.
My question on Retrocomputing.StackExchange is my attempt to add some historical background to this entry.
void-star|4 days ago
kgwxd|4 days ago
man8alexd|3 days ago
My question on Retrocomputing.StackExchange is my attempt to add some historical background to this entry.
[1]:https://alexeydemidov.com/2025/05/15/falsehoods-people-and-L...