why ubuntu LTS installs all in a single partition?

[Colin Law]

On 4 August 2013 22:33, Christofer C. Bell <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 4 August 2013 00:20, Christofer C. Bell <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > If you do not have a reasonable amount of swap in the system, any
>> > processes
>> > that request more memory to be allocated than you have free *physically*
>> > will not start, even if they do not need all the memory requested.  This
>> > will leave RAM unused that could have been used for running that
>> > process.
>> > Programs frequently request more memory than they actually need,
>> > accommodating these requests by providing a larger amount of memory
>> > (through
>> > virtual memory, even if you never intend the system to swap) allows you
>> > to
>> > run more software in the physical RAM you have available.
>>
>> Uh-huh.
>>
>> And tell me, do you have many multi-gigabyte processes running on your
>> servers?
>>
>> I don't.
>
>
> I'm disagreeing with you, Liam, I'm not insulting you.  And yes, I do have
> many multi-gigabyte processes running on servers I administer at work.  The
> machines in question have anywhere from 384-512 GB of RAM and run Oracle on
> RHEL.  The databases themselves are terabytes in size.

I am not sure that arguments about whether swap is required on systems
like that are particularly relevant to the average user.

Colin