I agree that having a lot of RAM is a good idea. However, I also think you should make your swap space as large as possible--many times larger than RAM, if pos

I agree that having a lot of RAM is a good idea. However, I also think you should make your swap space as large as possible--many times larger than RAM, if possible. Then, instead of having on-disk indexes, on-disk caches, and on-disk temporary files, have your applications cache everything in memory-resident data structures. The operating system will automatically swap stuff in and out as necessary. The better your operating system's VM, the better the performance will be. Save explicit disk usage for things that must be persistently stored like database tablespace files.