There are some handy benefits to having swap, if only a small amount of it. Specifically if you are a developer and make an oops in your code and develop a memory leak. this will help you to gracefully identify whats going on and do whatever testing you need to resolve your leak. it will allow you pt page out some memory pages that get used very infrequently (boot time only ect).

A couple handy bits of reading on the matter.

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Phil Waclawski <phil.waclawski@mesacc.edu> wrote:

From what I understand, for laptops to properly hibernate, they need at least as much swap as you have RAM. But on the little servers I set up for my students/etc....SWAP is never used.

Phil W
On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 9:13 PM, coverturtle <coverturtle@gmail.com> wrote:
The quick answer is that a swap partition is faster than a swap file. Using a file means you have the overhead of the file system software.
Using a partition means that the kernel can use the swap space with less overhead.

If you noticed when you installed, the linux installer only wants to allocate as much swap space as you have memory. If you intend to add more memory later, you might want to
make your swap partition as large as the maximum size of memory you computer will hold. OTOH, I've noticed that I hardly ever use any swap space at all and I only have 2GB
of memory.

Watch the memory use in more or less real time in you system monitor app.

On 03/15/2015 09:13 PM, Michael Havens wrote:
I was wondering why Linux uses a swap partition rather than a swap file. I mean I would think a swap file would be superior since a files size can fluctuate whereas a partition is static.

:-)~MIKE~(-:

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A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.

Stephen