Does anyone recall how Linux performs without swap? I recall having a problem with this type of setup in 2.4 way back when, but I don't remember the details. If this is a server, you probably have thrown lots of RAM at it anyway. Having a swap partition probably isn't necessary. It looks like Kernel Trap had an article on this one. [1]_ So, in May of 2004, the best performance for your machine is achieved with a swap. Is this still true today? That brings to question where swap should live: dedicated partitions (let the kernel stripe/decide where to page), RAID'ed devices (if you need mirroring), as a file on a filesystem. If you're worried about uptime, then swap on RAID1 or RAID5 or no swap at all is probably the way to go. What type of performance hit you have from not using swap v.s. disk-bound operations on a RAID1 or RAID5 block device is the subject of an experiment. In [1] it sounds like swap is necessary to maintain any type of reasonable performance. It doesn't sound like one would need much swap, just enough to swap out "unused memory to be replaced with often-used memory". Chad Relavent Links ============== .. [1] Jeremy, "Is Swap Necessary". Kernel Trap. 27 May 2004 http://kerneltrap.org/node/3202 (3 Feb 2006) -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */