I do have a swap partition but only so I can hibernate.
And you're smart to do so. Swap is useless for 99% of end-user systems. ChromeOS doesn't use any swap partition, for instance.
As for hibernation, it's not available if you use a crypted swap, which is wise to use (at least on a laptop).
As a result, I, too, disabled swap completely.
Finally, that's the first comment I get, instead of someone extolling the virtues of swap and babbling warmed-over 1990s rules of thumb about "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file" as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process, let alone 8GB.
Don't listen the parrots that repeat something that ceases to be true at least 10 years ago. Swap used to be a useful hack, it is not anymore.
> as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process
Well said ;-)
Those people have doubtless misunderstood the point of swap. You should have a swapfile/partition because it allows allocated but currently unused memory (from an application which keeps data hanging around which is not needed for most of it's working life, or an application which simply leaks) to be dumped to long term storage, thus freeing memory for its real use: page cache. Sweet, sweet page cache.
I'm always happy to see a few tens, even a couple of hundred MB of swap in use, because it means that some application had some unused data hanging around for so long that to leave it there would mean my machine having to read from disk more frequently, which would be Bad.
Keeping a swap partition in a 2011 computer is 1. a waste of disk space, 2. an unecessary matter of worries (2-1. may leak some infos, even if your other partitions are encrypted, if your computer is stolen, 2-2. a source of potential bugs).
Clearly, you don't need and basically can't use an 8GB swap partition. So, how long are you willing to put up with? That will vary, but let's say 10 seconds before you're "flipping out and killing processes". That's a 200MB swap partition. But... that's only 5% of the size of your RAM! If that's the difference between a process completing or not, you've probably already lost. Or you should just kill Firefox.
On a 4GB system, the most likely reason a process is pushing you into swap is that it is in an infinite allocation loop, and all having 4GB of swap does is make your system crawl that much more before the process dies.
This is a result of RAM sizes increasing far faster than hard drive write speed has. When I had 32MB of RAM, it made sense to have some swap. I could swap out, say, 16MB of unused executable pages (bits of windows, bits of drivers I'm not using, bits of the massive Office suite I'm not using, etc) and get that much more working set, and this could happen in a reasonable time; the system choked for a couple of seconds but recovered in a stable manner. Now swapping out 16MB of executable is a joke. SSDs may change the balance, but these balances have been out of whack for a long time, I rather suspect that even with an SSD it won't be worth swap. Especially since by the time SSDs are truly common 8GBs of RAM may be entry-level because, well, why not? (Poking at Best Buy really quickly, at the $500 line you get 4GB for laptops, a little over $300 for desktops, coming down fast. I'm not sure they have anything less than 2GB now and even that is really into "don't use swap" for the average user.)
I'm not sure what the consumption rate is, but he won't create general servers with more than 2GB swap (if that), no matter how much RAM the system has.
That said, if you never fill your RAM with buffers/cache, then of course swap makes no sense.
Memory is cheap. I'd rather pay a little more and have the long-running processes stay in memory than worry about my more active processes ending up in swap accidentally. If I wish to reserve 1GB for these long-running processes in RAM instead of swap, I can still win by buying 2GB more RAM.
Besides there's always some disk-backing you can't generally avoid: pages containing read-only executables can be purged from memory when unused and re-read from the original .so or binary when needed. This is something that would never go to swap anyway.