bob466 wrote:
Certainly if the swap file suits and works, there is no issue, and more RAM can eschew the need for any swap. But it's worth noting that swap files are significantly slower than swap partitions, and that's due in part to the way the linux filesystem handles files which are not always, nor necessarily, contiguous on the hardware. That means that the operating system may have to "hunt" for the relevant data over various hardware locations. There's an efficiency cost to that which is paid less in a partition which is contiguous.
Years ago Swap or Virtual Memory was needed because old 32bit systems would only have the maximum of 4GB of RAM...many systems ran on much less.
Back in the old days there was a rule...you must have 1.5GB of Virtual Memory for every GB of installed RAM or something like that...again a thing of the past.
The more RAM...the more you can Multi-task and as for a Swap File being slower...that doesn't make sense as I never use Swap as I have 16GB of RAM installed and it's all running on an SSD too.