Because then that would mean your swap would be your whole hard drive! That would suck! lol

swap doesn't have to be double your RAM...

on the setup you describe, there's nothing wrong with using a 2GB swap partition, or even less, or none... it's all relative to what kinda work you are doing...

if you really wanna use the entire 4 gigs for swap then just use a live cd distro which runs entirely in ramdisk... your computer will fly...

That could be so on Windows...in Linux you don't configure the swap with 2 Gb of memory (...).

Would it be faster than a primary partition w/swap?

yeah, when you have that kinda RAM, running a distro from a ramdisk will be a lot faster than doing it from the hard disk... the difference is HUGE... things that would have normally taken 10 seconds to open from the hard disk would take like one second from the ram disk (for example), depending on the compression used for the ramdisk and the cpu speed...

I have no swap and my system is blazing fast.

I hardly ever use swap on my 512meg system, and I run a LOT of stuff, 12 desktops worthe and I don't swap til I run Doom3... With 2 gig I doubt I would have swap at all... Maybe 200meg just in case (ie then I would see swap being used on the sysmon and know there was a mem problem...

Believe me, swap is a waste of space on modern systems. I have seen the memory reports several times and swap has *never* been used at all.

Utter waste of space on a machine with > 512 MB RAM.

Swap a waste? It depends. You have to know what memory you are likely to need. I often use up to a gig when doing certain jobs in the past (game map compiling) and with only 256-512 ram you need the swap to be able to do it... In fact for a while I would make a tem 500meg file that I would add as swap halfway through the compile process as I was running out of memory.

With the current 512meg I don't use swap most of the time, but I run a lot of apps and so occasionally use a little more... And if I crank up doom3 while running kmail, FF, OOo and all the rest it tends to swap a bit

So you make swap big enough to cover whatever your needs are. Once you use linux and your PC a while you soon learn what you need...

If I had a gig of ram I would rarely use swap, but would keep 500meg just in case as HDD's are really big and that space is nothing these days.

I currently run 512meg ram and about a gig of swap... That's mostly as I have 3 HD's in at the moment and they all used to have various lilnux installs on and so there are swap partitions everywhere...

Swap is all very well and good, but if you've got 2GB of RAM why would you need it? I can't imagine anything I would possibly be doing that would require that much RAM... of course, in a few years that'll probably be standard on new systems.

And now, some words of wisdom about memory

I have used over 1 gig but at this stage I have never used 2 gig... I suppose it would depend on what you do with the PC. If I had a gig of ram I would need very little swap, if any...

The old swap="2 times RAM" rule was from a time long past.
32 (maybe 64) Meb RAM days.

HOWEVER: I've got a Gig, and regularly have more than a Gig of swap active as well.
So, don't think swap is a waste on modern systems.

Swap still has its purposes for many other reasons.

We have production database servers with 32GB of memory and 32GB of swap space.. anyone guess into telling me why it's setup like that?

And at any given time during peak loads, swap is used and sometimes up to 30% to 40%.

Some of our lower class clustered machines have anywhere between 2 and 4GB of RAM with always a swap space of 2GB... Those hit 70% swap usage at times during high load times..

It just all depends on what your running or doing. Yeah, you got a workstation at home with 512mb or more of memory and your doing small tasks like email, internet browsing.. you shouldn't ever use swap, but its still good to have some allocated.

My workstations where I play no games have anywhere from 512mb to 1.5GB of memory.. all have at least a 200mb swap partition or less..

I have a token swap space of 100 to 200 MB on my hard disk just to feel safe.

But of course, since I'm basically a desktop user and I have 512 MB of RAM, swap is hardly used, if at all.