Chris Jepeway writes:

>Say I've got 512M of RAM.  Why do I need swap?  Crash dumps,

One point might be that the system writes out idle pages over time,
thus leaving more room for the buffer cache etc.
Apart from that, I don't think 512 megs is so overly large today
that you can live without swap (can easily be filled by working
on a larger image in gimp, for example).

-- 
Matthias Buelow
home: mkb/at/mukappabeta.de
uni:  mkb/at/informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de