[Scottish] Swap partitions -- do modern boxen really need them? Discuss

[Lawrence Sweeney]

On 2003.07.16 10:01 willie fleming wrote:
> Many users now have >512Mb RAM. Do we really need to allocate 2x RAM
> for swap?
> 

No, not really. The virtual memory subsystem pre ~2.10 mapped your all 
the contents of RAM onto the swap, so so unless you had more swap than 
RAM, then in effect you had _no_ swap space. At that time therefore 2 * 
RAM was recommended. After the VM wars at that time, the new VMM did 
not work that way, so not so much swap is needed.

Perhaps it is worth noting here that it is possible to run without a 
dedicated swap partition, using http://cvs.linux.hr/swapd/ .

See the swap mini-howto 
http://www.xenotime.net/linux/doc/swap-mini-howto.txt for more swap 
info.

cheers

Lawrence