Swap - is it still best to use a dedicated partition?
 

Using RH since the 4.x days, I always remember it was best to create a dedicated partition. Recently I upgraded a 6.2 directly to 7.2 and was told the partition size I'd set was too small, but it let me create a file on disk (my only option at that point in the install).

Presumably a swap file can grow whereas a partition cannot. With all this work on the swap areas, and in particular my effectively wasting the old partition as it is too small, I was wondering if its now best to start using a file in all cases.

nope, whole swap partitions are still very much the standard

Redhat kinda forces a quite large size for your swap partition. But if you have plenty of RAM in it then it probably won't use it much at all. If it was running fine using that swap partition in 6.2 then I'm sure 7.2 will work fine with the same swap partition.
So unless you run large memory consuming processes (which will really slow down your machine anyways if it's constantly swapping) then it wouldn't hurt to force it to use the smaller swap partition anyways.

Ram is now 256M and yes, its a server running heavy java stuff such as resin for servlets and jboss for ejbs.

The rule of thumb is double your ram for swap..unless you have a shite load of ram.

nah, that rule is at least 15 years old. For when you had to morgage a house to get a few extra meg of RAM.

Generally machines hace enough RAM in the first place and seldomly make use of swap at all.