pclissold wrote:
No swap is fine as long as you are confident that you will never come close to using all of your physical memory.
True, but I'd rather have some available in case it's needed. Better than running afoul of nasty thrashing or worse the OOM killer (I've seen it in action, it's not pretty).
If your running applications will consistently fit into RAM (with some room to spare), generally the box will rarely, if ever, swap anything out to disk. You can also control this to some degree by adjusting the value of '/proc/sys/vm/swappiness'... I just looked and my linode is set to '60'. Higher numbers will make you swap more. Lower will swap less. Unfortunately, this sort of tuning can be the source of great holy wars and flame fests on various boards. Preferable values will vary depending on the sort of system you're running, performance testing, etc.