question on virtualmemory

[beginner2011]

Hi,
many times i have seen virtual memory restricted to twice the ram size..why is it so? can u please explain.

[Azagaros]

That is usually an administrator's choice. It also is designers of os choice. On Linux you can make your virtual memory as big as you need it though around 10% of total memory should be sufficient. The other situation is it might be max unsigned Integer of a given machine which is a convenient number.