Re: [gentoo-user] To swap or not to swap? Is it really needed?

["Claudio Roberto França Pereira" <spideybr@gmail.com>]

Sorry for being so general, for not giving any real info. I'm new to
system monitoring, I just learnt about iostat and swapon -s, now about
vmstat. I mainly tried to catch anything unusual in top/htop.

Trying to be more specifically, my system is a core 2 duo, dual core
3ghz processor, 4gb of ram (now 2gb), ATI radeon HD4850 with 512mb of
vram. I used to play a lot on this box, now a lot less. On Gentoo,
when I play is some browser game or cowsay (it's in games-misc!), not
anything relevant. I'm using radeon open source drivers, by the way.
My main use, currently, is web surfing, firefox with LOTS of tabs,
email, social networks and random browsing. Firefox alone uses lots of
ram, almost always it's using more than a half GB, sometimes it passes
the 1gb mark. I also do Qt develop on this, but nothing heavy. No
virtual machines, no 3d rendering, no heavy processing, no
hibernation.

So, I'm just a basic common web surfer. In this case, can I say it's
at least SAFE to disable swap? I'll look into "last month's" thread on
this.