[vox-tech] Three Install Questions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Josh Parsons (jbparsons at ucdavis.edu):

> As you say, obviously adding more RAM to a machine reduces (rather than
> increasing) the need for swap. It's odd that people seem to behave as if
> the reverse were true. :)

People often misread -- or, well, overinterpret -- the output of "free"
and "top":  Those utilities _will_ show some swap usage regardless of
how much RAM you add.  Provide the kernel with some swap space to use,
and it will put the swap to work -- and also allocate all available,
otherwise uncommitted physical RAM as disk buffers / cache.

If you've previously only lived in a DOS/Windows or Mac OS v. < 10
world, the picture this paints can seem misleading.