- cross-posted to:
- linuxmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linuxmemes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51845693
Credit to @ryanc@infosec.exchange
I just did the graphic
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Does it make a system more stable or less stable? What about under proxmox?
Everytime I install a fresh OS I setup swap when I feel I’m having OOM issues or random freezes, it’s just creating one 16GB file and enabling it as swap. Much easier than going to read now about zswap zram ot whatever I’m “supposed” to be using.
Sorry, my 8 GB study laptop freezes all the time on Librewolf and it has a Bay Trail chip. I gotta have it.
Great send up of Swap!
Swap is great though. And to point out again that there are ratings on quality SSDs for the lifetime writes. Pull up the data sheet and look for “DWPD”, which is “Disk Writes Per Day”. Typical numbers for good swap drives are 1 and 3. If DWPD is not listed, then plan for frequent drive failures if using heavy, heavy swap (like for ZFS swap drives (Yes, these are different from a OS swap partition)).
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the DWPD statistic.
Please, for the love of who ever you hold in high esteem, use swap. See: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html Now I don’t really like the whole “Heres an article from some rando to prove my point” thing, but anecdotally, the article does line up with my experience (with 32 gigs of system memory). Namely, when I went without swap I experienced frequent system lock-ups, when I added swap on zram, lock ups still happened but less frequently, and when I eventually added disk swap on the recommendation of this article lock ups never happened again.
To add some nuance to this, do not use ZRAM in combination with swap. There’s ZSWAP for that which does what you would expect, without clogging up your RAM and gracefully handling a backing device. (ZRAM is just another block device for the kernel, so you will get LRU inversion if it fills up and you have another layer of swap on disk. Meaning your cold pages will be needlessly stuck in zram.)
Yeah, the same person who wrote the article I linked above also wrote one on zram vs zswap, which I think is also a good read: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
Lol, I stopped swapping when I got enough RAM to never need swap
Even if you don’t run out of RAM your kernel will use swap to defragment your memory. Usually you end up with gaps in memory that are too small to effectively allocate as programs open, close or stay running over time.
That’s ok, I have enough RAM that I’m not particularly worried about that either. I also don’t leave my computer on all night, I like to be nice to my tech, also locks my drives
I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, thank you.
I miss Intel optane
Meanwhile here I am partitioning 20Gb of SWAP because I want 0 chance of an OOM moment.
I usually make swap partitions on hdds tho never on ssds. I can happily spare ~10GB hdd space in this memory drought.
My skyrim modpack need 60GB of Swap Space :(
Oh, you mean the hibernation space? ZZzzzzz…
I know right now you’re stuck exclusively using swap, but If you work hard and apply yourself, you may one day be able to afford one whole gigabyte of ram without going more than five figures into debt.
pagefile.sys has entered the chat.
And if you need swap just do a swap file
If you need swap, you probably should look at the tradeoffs of a file vs. a partition, or maybe even adding another entire disk.
But if you don’t know if you’ll need it, it’s because you won’t.
