> In my experience, the linux kernel handles no swap at all very badly, so you need a small amount.
Why?
I'm pretty sure we disable swap at Google. Maybe swap was necessary back in the days when memory was really tight, but it seems like a terrible idea now. Especially since the scheduling is completely oblivious to swap AFAIK, which means that a heavily swapped system will spend most of its timeslices just swapping program code back into memory. It's the worst kind of thrashing.
Why?
I'm pretty sure we disable swap at Google. Maybe swap was necessary back in the days when memory was really tight, but it seems like a terrible idea now. Especially since the scheduling is completely oblivious to swap AFAIK, which means that a heavily swapped system will spend most of its timeslices just swapping program code back into memory. It's the worst kind of thrashing.