* Herman L. Knief
No, not necessarily. It really depends on the applications and usage of the machine. If you were running big databases, then having a lot of swap would likely be more important. If you are only using this as your desktop, I wouldn't worry about it. Some machines/OS like Sun/Solaris can save crash dump info, which it needs at least as much swap as there is physical ram in order to save the crash... but Linux does not do this.
Rule of thumb is 2cs as much swap as RAM. But before you go off and buy a lot of RAM , what video card are you using ? Which version of XFree ? I used to have the memory leak problem as well, but upgrading to XFRee 4.2 (and then to the 1.2XXX series of the nvidia driver) solved those issues. My home box is up for 10 days and still lists total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 255564 251620 3944 0 7112 79864 -/+ buffers/cache: 164644 90920 Swap: 530136 114856 415280 whereas I usually had to restart X once every week (or had X restart itself every week ;)_ ) due to memory leaks. The box at work is up for 7 days (had to change the cd burner) and sais: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1028204 1006692 21512 0 193316 405856 -/+ buffers/cache: 407520 620684 Swap: 3671464 246704 3424760 [but I've restarted the Xserver a couple of times on firday because I was fiddling around with the at libs in order to get Xft/AA working again on kde302/suse73. in the end I got the Qt rpms from the 8.0 kde302 and installed them over the 7.3 roms and now I have AA/XFT working again. Kind regards, -- Gerhard den Hollander Phone :+31-10.280.1515 Global IT Support manager Direct:+31-10.280.1539 Jason Geosystems BV Fax :+31-10.280.1511 (When calling please note: we are in GMT+1) gdenhollander@jasongeo.com POBox 1573 visit us at http://www.jasongeo.com 3000 BN Rotterdam JASON.......#1 in Reservoir Characterization The Netherlands This e-mail and any attachment is/are intended solely for the named addressee(s) and may contain information that is confidential and privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, we request that you do not disseminate, forward, distribute or copy this e-mail message. If you have received this e-mail message in error, please notify us immediately by telephone and destroy the original message.