Do Modern PCs Need Swap Space?

chill asks: "The price of RAM has plummeted lately. On Price Watch I've seen 256 Mb PC-133 DIMMs for as little as $16 + shipping. Now that every machine I own has 768 Mb - 1.5 Gb of RAM, the question arises -- do I -need- swap space? I'm not talking about running large databases or enterprise machines, but the home PC/Workstation -- word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, some minor coding and that sort of thing." With memory so cheap, there is reason to wonder about the necessity of swap. Does a machine with 1-2G of RAM really NEED swap space if they are not running intensive software? Have any of you seen machines in production with the swap explicitly turned off?

Comments

Just in Case

[Bryan Andersen]

I'd say keep a swap space just incase you run out of memory. Linux dosen't handle running out of memory gracefully.

What's the difference?

[PD]

Numerous people here have suggested that you need swap to prevent the problem of running out of memory.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's pretend we have two machines, identical in every way, except that one machine has 320 MB of physical RAM and no swap, and the other machine has 64 MB of RAM and 256MB of swap.

Are people suggesting that the machine with 64 MB RAM and 256 MB of swap can handle more than the other machine? If not, then why should there be any need to mess with swap if you've got a gig of RAM to play with?