Quoting Rohit <rohits@mahindrabt.com>:
I have 128 MB RAM and 128 MB swap right now. What if I double my RAM and disable swap altogether? What can go wrong for the same setup?
Swap space should really be 2 times the physical ram in a machine. This is required if the memory is filled by the programes you are using, then you load a program like for example OpenOffice. There will not be enough ram for this program so all/some of the programs in ram will need to be put to swap. If you then need to swap back to one or all of these other programs, you need swap space to copy whatever is currently in memory to the swap space. If you've only got 1x physical ram, you may get problems. If you decide to remove swap space, you may also get problems. Basically if Linux runs out of memory it starts randomly (well it appears random) killing applications. The program it kills might just be your important document that you've spent the last 2 hours creating. I would keep the swap space, as you never know what could happen. Better safe then sorry. I would recommend adding more ram as Linux uses it for caching. So if some program doesn't need the ram it is normally put to some good use, although too much is just a waste of money. Adam