2 GB of ram, do I need a swap partition?
 

I am rolling with RAID 0 + 1 and 2 GB of ecc ram.

Do I need a swap partition? Isn't it just for people that can't afford 2GB of ram?

No technically you don't need a swap partition but if you system ever get close to using 2GB or ram bad things will happen. I believe the 2.4 kernel memory system will drop the most memory intensive app, which could be anything... your kernel... crash.

The 2.6 kernel has an option that you can include to tell it what to kill.

Although if you never approach more than 2GB of ram then no you don't need a swap and even if you had one it would never be used.

But since you are rich and can afford 2GB or ram, I bet you have two 200 GB hard drives so what is a gig or two of swap going to hurt? lol.

You might also want a swap partition (but less than 2Gb will usually do) if you want to setup your PC to suspend to disk.
In this case, the suspend script saves the barest minimum of your allocated physical ram to your swap partition - things such as cached files, buffers etc are ignored. When you next boot, the startup procedure cheks your swap partition for a suspended system and if it finds one, loads restores it.

AFAIK you cannot use a suspend file to achieve this, it must be a swap partition.