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Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space
- ktpsns 7y agoFrom my Linux desktop experience, I could not disagree more. When my 16GB ThinkPad runs out of memory, the OOM Killer blinks for a fraction of a second to kill the faulty process. If I had a swap partition, disk IO would render the system unusable for hours before the OOM Killer kicks in. Also, I don't want my SSD lifetime be sacrificed for a neglectable amount of better RAM usage -- on the desktop, I either run out of memory quickly (because my code makes mistakes) or I never feel the reach for 16GB of RAM. On the server the situation is very different, and a few GB Swap on a spinning disc might be a good idea even when having 128GB of RAM.
- fs2 7y agoDisagree, on most of my systems I don't even have swap partition anymore. The few times I need it, I can just create a swap file on the fly and have any amount of swap memory. Performance problems the author describes can be fixed 90% of the time by changing the dirty_background_ratio in the kernel as described here: https://linuxmaster.cc/s/improve_performance_and_fix_unresponsive_systems_under_heavy_diskio_load https://linuxmaster.cc/s/improve_performance_and_fix_unrespo...