RE: why swap at all?

[Buddy Lumpkin]

> In my experience, it's perfectly possible to run a typical desktop system
> with no swap at all.  Certainly the 'double the amount of physical RAM' 
> guideline has been taken far too literally in my opinion.

--------snip---------

In older BSD systems like SunOS 4.x, malloc would literally fail if you did
not have enough physical memory and backing store (swap) to store that
anonymous memory segment. 

This meant that if you wanted to leverage swap to get additional virtual
memory beyond the amount of installed physical memory, you needed more than
1x physical memory. This is where the old 2x physical memory came from.

--Buddy

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