Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty

[Gordon Messmer]

On 08/18/2010 04:00 AM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> With this amount of RAM being sufficient, do I really need a swap
> partition set up? I do understand that a swap partition is needed for
> hibernation, but this server does not need to hibernate.

Depends on the purpose of the machine.  Desktops often don't.  If your 
system is dedicated to running a single very large application, it is. 
Although processes under Linux get a COW image of their parent's memory 
at the time they fork(), the default configuration requires that there 
is at least enough memory for a copy.