Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty

[Andras Simon]

On 8/18/10, James Mckenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Andras Simon <szajmi at gmail.com> wrote:

>>I'm not sure what you mean by "need", but Fedora will run without a
>>swap partition.
>>
> It will, that is true, but from my UNIX training, it is always a good idea
> to have a swap partition, but you don't have to follow the 2x rule.  500MB

Not if all you have is a 4G SSD (and 2G RAM)... Never say 'always', I guess :-)

> or maybe even 250MB will do.  Check it with the swap command, and if no
> space is ever used, then you can remove it and reclaim the space.  Never say
> "swap is not needed".  I've seen systems with 32 GB of available ram use
> swap.

Of course! No amount of memory is too much, especially on a server
where you might want an in-memory database or something.

Andras