Is a swap necessary?

[jackripper]

Ok so I installed Dapper on my new Compaq laptop. I didn't partition part of the drive for a swap because I'm thinking a swap is likes windows virtual memory. Plus I also have 1gb of ram on my laptop.
So is a swap necessary?

[nixternal]

Re: Is a swap necessary?

no swap isn't necessary, but can be nice at times. Even with 1gb of ram, I would still do a 768mb swap partition just to feel safe You should be fine though, and if the time comes that you need the swap, just run qtparted and resize a partition and add 768mb of swap.

[Fenyx]

Re: Is a swap necessary?

With a 640MB RAM (512+128) I almost never use my 1GB swap, except when I have to run something that uses Sun's Java (which is a terrible memory hog).

A swap partition is not absolutely necessary for systems with 512MB+ of RAM, but I still think that one should have at least a minimum of 512MB swap space for backup. You never now when you're going to need it.

There's also this thing about making swap files rather than swap partitions, which is I think more dynamic in the sense that you can remove the swap file if you don't need it and make it when you do need it. I'm not quite familiar with it, though, so I can't give any recommendations.