Is swap nescessary?

[mamamia88]

I have a netbook. I had 2gb i was going to dedicate to swap but for some reason it says unusable. does anyone know if it will have a performance hit to go without swap?

[SuperSonic4]

It will have a performance hit if you use heavy duty apps

[mamamia88]

so if i just use rhytmbox and firefox i should be alright? also is it possible to add swap post install?

[tom.swartz07]

I have a netbook. I had 2gb i was going to dedicate to swap but for some reason it says unusable. does anyone know if it will have a performance hit to go without swap?

yeah, you will get a bit of a loss if you dont have it, and you will lose your ability to suspend/hibernate.

Just out of curiosity, what were you going to use for swap? the way you have it worded, it makes me wonder if you were going to put it on a flash drive or something.

You only need as much swap as you have ram (some say 1.5X ram, still more say 2x) but generally its just used as a 'safe spot' for files you have open but arent using, a place to write your current status if you want to hibernate, and a dedicated 'overflow' for your ram.

[A_M_S]

The swap file is also used when you hibernate your computer.

[cherva]

The SWAP partition is used as if it was RAM ... if you open a lot of things and you need more ram that you have, ubuntu will start writing in the SWAP partition. But the most important thing about SWAP on laptops/netbooks is that if you don't have swap or it is not two times your RAM or bigger you won't be able to SUSPEND the laptop/netbook. In SUSPEND mode your laptop does not require any power because everything from your RAM is written to the hard drives SWAP partition and when you power up the computer everything will return to the state when you SUSPENDED your computer.

P.S
...... 4 comments for the time I wrote this NICE

[mamamia88]

gparted won't let me create any more partitions so how can i add swap?

[SuperSonic4]

You can remove an existing partition and create a logical partition on which you can add more than one.

[mamamia88]

there isn't a partition i can delelte. right now i have a 100mb system partition for windows, a 80gb partition for the rest of windows, a root partition of 15gb for ubuntu, and a 50gb home partition for ubuntu. why won't it let me use my dedicated swap space?

[HarrisonFan]

Although I have never tried it, I believe there is a way to create a swap file post install as well.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-a...ap-file-howto/

BTW, I have installed 9.04 on two Aspire One Netbooks both without swap. I disabled the Hibernate options since this does not work well (or at all) without swap. Those with the Netbooks haven't had any memory related issues at all.