Should I make a swap file?
 

I have an Asus Eee 1000H running Aurora (the new Eeebuntu). It has a gig of RAM. I have set it up with / and /home partitions, not bothering with a swap partition as I understand this could shorten the life of the flash drive. But I understand I could have a swap file which I activate with the swapon command.

What I'm wondering is, will this make any difference to the performance of this machine, which is used for word processing, email, music listening and the odd bit of Youtube - sometimes all at once. Any comments?

I've got a Dell Mini with 2 GB RAM and no swap. I've never missed it. Try running without a swap for a bit and if you find things crashing, it might be worth setting one up, but for light work, you'll probably be fine.

^^ This.

Only way to tell is to give it a test run without a /swap. 1GB isn't too shabby for RAM, so I think you'll be okay.

The only thing swap will do is to sometimes save you from the OOM killer, when you run out of RAM. However, I do NOT recommend putting a swap partition or file on a SSD, because it will wear it out. There is no performance benefit to be obtained from swap.

If swap isn't needed, it will not be used.

If it is needed, and you haven't got any, OOM killer may start :(

SSD seems pretty reliable nowadays - see this (old) post:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit

I have an EEE701-4G, with swap, and 1GB RAM. It's 4y old now (time flies), no problems.

So I am voting for "Enable some swap space" :)

Thanks all. I think I'll leave it as it is for now

I've been running Fedora and Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire One (1GB) without a swap file for two years now without any obvious problems