Apparently, though unproven, at 03:21 on Monday 17 January 2011, William Kenworthy did opine thusly:
> > A > > modern desktop that swaps is unusable - enormous amounts of data has to > > be pulled back in from the drive. A web server that swaps is already > > thrashing so you always want to avoid that. > > > > Besides, RAM is cheap and a server with 24G is common place. So is 4G on > > a notebook. So your viewpoint is completely correct. > > > > The kernel does need some swap though - it needs wiggle room for when you > > DO run out of RAM, and a little bit of swap gives that. It also staves > > off that bastard demon spawn progeny of satan called the dreaded oom > > killer.... > > There is one case where ~2xram is still a good idea - when hibernating > to swap using (in my case) tuxonice - 2xram gives a reasonable safety > margin for hibernation plus existing swap contents. Yes, that's true. But modern notebooks often have 4G of RAM so that's a big partition for hibernating. Swap files probably function better for that case. I stopped hibernating a long time ago for that reason and now just suspend. Besides, the machine is seldom off for more than 4 hours -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
