After typing this many characters the swap file will be written to disk. When zero, no swap file will be created at all (see chapter on recovery crash-recovery). 'updatecount' is set to zero by starting Vim with the "-n" option, see startup. When editing in readonly mode this option will be initialized to 10000. The swapfile can be disabled per buffer with 'swapfile'. When 'updatecount' is set from zero to non-zero, swap files are created for all buffers that have 'swapfile' set. When 'updatecount' is set to zero, existing swap files are not deleted. Also see 'swapsync'. This option has no meaning in buffers where 'buftype' is "nofile" or "nowrite".

(default: 200)