[ch_123]

You're implying that people are telling you to set up swap without any reason, when in fact there are good reasons - namely dealing with memory pressure. Maybe you could fit so much RAM into your computer that you never hit pressure - but why would you do that vs allocating a few GB of disk space for swap?

Also, as has been pointed out by another commenter, 8GB of swap for a system with 8GB of physical memory is overkill.

[tremon]

I'm also in the GP's camp; RAM is for volatile data, disk is for data persistence. The first "why would you do that" that needs to be addressed is why volatile data should be written to disk. And "it's just a few % of your disk" is not a sufficient answer to that question.

[112233]

> RAM is for volatile data, disk is for data persistence.

Genuinely curious where this idea has come from. Is it something being taught currently?

[ch_123]

Because of cost - particularly given the current state of the RAM market. In order to have so much memory that you never hit memory spikes, you will deliberately need to buy RAM to never be used.

Note that simply buying more RAM than what you expect to use is not going to help. Going back to my post from earlier, I had a laptop with 8GB of RAM at a time where I would usually only need about 2-4GB of RAM for even relatively heavy usage. However, every once in a while, I would run something that would spike memory usage and make the system unresponsive. While I have much more than 8GB nowadays, I'm not convinced that it's enough to have completely outrun the risk of this sort of behaviour re-occuring.