To swap or not to swap that is the question

[billhorne at attbi.com]

> Someone sent me email regarding swap space. He mentioned that on memory 
> larger than 512M, one does not need swap. I disagree, but I would like to 
> get some educated opinion on this. 
> Historically, one would configure swap to be 3 X memory. However today with 
> memories typically larger than 100MB, this has changed. Certainly on 
> different types of systems, swap configuration decisions would be 
> different, such as a web or email server where you may have a large number 
> of processes or threads.  

I'd like to get a figure for lower end desktop systems, running 
32, 64, or 128MB of RAM.

Bill Horne