My approach to swap:
I hate it with a passion, and would not have it at all if I could avoid it. There is a reason a good programmer tests for the return value of malloc() after all. There is also a good reason I buy/request 1 GB RAM or more. If all of my programs cannot fit into 1 GB of physical RAM, I want one of them to just fail and tell me there is not enough RAM to run it instead of pretending that there is and making the HDD go bzzz...
However, even with 1GB+ RAM you can run into serious problems on Linux if your swap is 0 because of some features (or rather flaws) in the VM design. Linux kernel caches files aggressively, but unfortunately is not very robust when it has cached too much and there is no swap. So I give it the minimum I can get away with on systems with lots of RAM, and a bit more on systems with less.
-- Sasha Pachev AskSasha Linux Consulting http://www.asksasha.com
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