On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 5:44 PM, K K <[email protected]> wrote: > This *was* reasonable advice for the older generations of > CompactFlash, but may no longer be a consideration with newer > flash/SSD drives. > > I have run many embedded servers (mostly OpenBSD on Soekris) without > swap, never had any problems traceable to the lack of swap space.
Why do we keep repeating 10 year old advice that may have applied to crappy 1GB flash and think it matters for 100GB drives using rather different technology? When you run newfs, do you make sure to line the cylinder groups up just right? Because that was standard advice too. More relevantly, I bet you never tried starting firefox on your soekris. Why does everyone assume that the only possible use for an SSD hard drive is in some crippled embedded box? Heaven forbid somebody put a fast drive in a computer that they'll actually use. I've got 4GB of SSD swap in my laptop. Yes, 4GB of swap on SSD! OMG!!! It'll wear out in a month! Why do you assume that merely creating a swap partition somehow forces the kernel to use it? If your system is running without a swap partition, it can run without writing to swap too.
