Is Swap Necessary?

johnnyb writes "Kernel Trap has a great conversation on swap, whether it's necessary, why swapless systems might seem faster, and an overall discussion of swap issues in modern computing. This is often an issue for system administrators, and this is a great set of posts about the issue."

If You have enough RAM

[Greyfox]

You could make a big ramdisk and swap to that!

Swap space not needed....

[kidgenius]

If you've got 128MB of RAM you have plenty and therefore will have no need for swap space. I mean, isn't 640k enough for everyone?

Re:If You have enough RAM

[whiteranger99x]

Yeah, just remember to allocate twice the amount of ram that you have installed! :)

gmail

[maxbang]

I use my gmail account as my swap partition. It's fully searchable and displays helpful advertisements every time I load fifty tabs in Firefox and OpenOffice goes idle. I don't know what I'd do without it. I'd probably be less of an unfunny jackass.

We don't need swap

[Anonymous Coward]

We can just make an OS that reboots every time it runs out of memory. Oh, wait, someone already did that...

Re:gmail

[maxbang]

Dude, that's the funniest thing I've read today. And I'd totally date you, but my IQ is four. I'm typing this with a toothbrush that's stapled to my head.

Re:Where many people miss the point...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Well, *most* apps won't just arbitrarily consume memory

I assume you are excluding Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Windows 98, Windows ME, Word, Excel, etc.

Re:What about Diskless Drives!

[shione]

Did anyone else read that as dickless drives? Man I think I need glasses.

Re: Hardly ever use swap

[Black Parrot]

> Pan is an awesome program, but seriously...when it can single handedly use > 1GB of RAM just stealing divx rips...

Think of it as a sin tax.