If you don't need it, you don't need it. The other question is: how much swap exactly should I have? And why wouldn't I just add that much RAM instead?
> In the end the core idea is: sometimes you have anonymous memory that is accessed so rarely that you'd rather have an extra disk cache page.
That's the theory. In practice I always have more than enough RAM for all the cached pages the system wants to cache. On my laptop right now (booted today), I have 500MB of cached pages and 5.8 gigabytes of free memory. On my server (booted 499 days ago) I have 700MB of cached pages and 6 gigabytes of free memory.
If I were running out of memory [be it for cache or applications], I'd prefer to have more RAM than add swap. Yes, I keep calling it emergency memory.
> If you assume that the kernel is not paging out memory that you actually use when not under pressure, swap doesn't hurt you.
1) Bad assumption 2) it doesn't help you either, so why bother? Actually I might have a use for that disk space. In that case the swap just hurts.
