Nope. Swap is not needed. It can help, but I've run systems with 512MB-1GB of RAM with no swap, with no issues. It wasn't long ago that most systems had 256MB of swap+RAM total. Having actual RAM is better than swap. Swap is there to make up for not having enough physical RAM. RAM is cheap nowadays, so the need for swap is greatly reduced.
Jon.
On 6/28/07, feba thatl [email protected] wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't linux REQUIRE some sort of swap? If you don't give a swap partition, it should just make a swap page, right?
On 6/28/07, Jon Pruente [email protected] wrote:
On a second note, for those who want to do a full install to flash media of any sort, it's best to NOT use swap space on the device. Flash media has limited write cycles and running swap on it will run down your devices lifetime. If you have a (somewhat) disposable device, putting swap on it may speed up your system a little, but it might also lead to memory errors in the future. Keep an eye out on all those guys running ReadyBoost in Vista, as it's a long term file caching system and does not do a bunch of R/W operations like swap does.