Jerry Feldman wrote:
... (I go back to the days when 1MB or RAM was considered a lot).
Heh -- I got my first home computer when 64K was an extravagantly expensive add-on, and OS-9 personal edition ran marvelously in my 16K CoCo ($399!).
But, when it is not unusual for a desktop system to have 1GB RAM with large (100GB+) hard drives, then allocating 2 or 3GB of swap is not excessive eventhough it is probably mostly wasted space.
I suppose it's needed for graphics-intensive programs (I use a couple of CAD systems myself), but I suspect that most people would not notice the swapping delays if they had just enough RAM and lots of swap. But then, RAM is so cheap, now, that I guess Denning's admonition to provide enough memory to satisfy the locality requirements and leave the rest to swap is less important than it was in the '70's :-). John Perry