On 10/29/06, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> I don't think there's any explicit rationale -- at least, nothing > beyond "8GB is quite a bit" :-) I once heard that the way Linux works, it's best to have swap space anyway; I don't know what the rationale was from a technical perspective, but you may want to verify this.
The usual reasoning (AFAIK) is that on any long running system there will be pages belonging to programs that are not used after startup. Having a small amount of swap (say 128MB or so) allows the system to swap out these useless pages and use that memory for cache or network buffers instead. On the systems I deal with that usually gives me an extra 50-100MB of free memory for caching, but whether that's noticable on a server with 8GB of RAM I have no idea. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/