"swap" partition leads to instability?

[Eduardo Morras]

On Sun, 26 May 2013 01:58:32 -0700 (PDT)
"M. V." <bored_to_death85 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> hi everyone,
> 
> I have a 24/7 network server/gateway with FreeBSD-8.2 on a SSD drive. it's partitioned as normal (/ , /tmp, /var , /usr and swap) for a long time now. But recently I heard from a FreeBSD expert that I shouldn't have swap partition for my server, and having swap partition could make my server unstable. this was so strange for me, and I searched a lot but couldn't find a reason for this claim.
> 
> 
> so my question is simple:
> - could having a "swap" partition, be a bad thing for my FreeBSD server? and if so, why and in what conditions?

I never had a problem with swap partitions, but perhaps the FreeBSD expert may refer to one of this three issues I can think about problems with swap, none of them are unstability issues:

a) Swap partitions may store info from previous boot, you can use swap encryption for that.
b) When using swap files (mounting a swap in a file), at shutdown sometimes there's a race condition and swap is unmounted before it's empty.
c) If your system needs to use swap, network apps may show/throw timeouts when swap i/o is heavy.

Sometimes b) kicks me but it's my fault because i don't shutdown process properly.

> 
> Cheers!

L

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Eduardo Morras <emorrasg at yahoo.es>