There is one point made above that I think is worth repeating: Disks have gotten large and cheap, any machine with 8GB of memory is likely to have at minimum 500GB of disk space. In that light, a 1-8GB partition for swap is more than manageable just to keep things safe. It's entirely plausible that aside form suspend, there will come a day when SOMETHING will want that much memory.

And it'll probably be a memory leak.

Applications have always responded to increased memory and disk storage. Remember when most screens were 1024x768 and videos a fraction of that size? Applications were installed from floppies. Remember the quote "640K ought to be enought for everybody"?

Yup. Although, 8 GB RAM will suffice for at least the forseeable future.

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OK, if you won't tell us what they are, will you point to one of these many sources?

I don't disagree with this at all. What I disagree with is that presumption that just because you have more memory, you need more swap space.

RAM has become so cheap that manufacturers are throwing 8GB at personal machines. It will be a rare user who sees even a large fraction of that 8GB in use, no matter how sloppy the programming gets. There just aren't that many tasks that need that kind of memory footprint. The ones that are are essentially batch mode processes that spend a long time computing a large data set. How many home users are there that have such a task to do?

I do appreciate the comments from those who are more geared toward a commercial/server environment. However it was my understanding that the OP is a home user.

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Apparently not.

This article is pretty good. http://www.linux.com/news/software/a...nux-swap-space

I already mentioned this but they put it better:

Second, a significant number of the pages used by an application during its startup phase may only be used for initialization and then never used again. The system can swap out those pages and free the memory for other applications or even for the disk cache.

I think that it can be argued that a workstation with more memory will have run more applications, many of which you won't go back to for a long time. Letting the memory for those applications swap out will leave more real memory for the apps you are currently using.

My rule of thumb today is to have a bit more swap than physical memory to allow suspending to work.

ok, now don't be silly. We know what swap is, but I also know that it is NOT mandatory. It is usually a good idea to have some swap, but by no means is it mandatory, in fact if you have lots of RAM and don't really do much with it, swap is a waste of space.