4 ms·

> Swapping 32GB of memory in and out of an NVMe SSD is much faster than swapping 1GB out of a spinning disk so I really don't get that argument. This is true,

by seppel 2y ago

> Swapping 32GB of memory in and out of an NVMe SSD is much faster than swapping 1GB out of a spinning disk so I really don't get that argument. This is true, but it still takes time. What kind of workload do you have where you swap out 32GB of RAM? If you are in this situation you almost certainly need to buy these additional 32GB of RAM.

littlestymaar 2y ago
On a desktop/laptop, where most of the “used” RAM (browser tabs) isn't actually used at once.
- seppel 2y ago
  Firefox (and I guess Chrome as well) throws aways memory of unused tabs.
  - astrange 2y ago
    You can't do that in all situations, since they could have important state.
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    Which is incredibly annoying and thankfully can be disabled.
Joker_vD 2y ago
What if I don't have no more free DIMM slots but I already have 1 TiB NVMe and I am fine with my workload being finished slightly (or even noticeably) slower as opposed to not being able to do at all? As an example of such workload: a server, one of the many, that runs financial calculations from many web users. It's fine for it to become somewhat slower: we'll notice the performance degradation in the metrics and stop accepting new connections for a while. It is not fine for it to just die with OOM ― the users automatically will reconnect to other servers, leading to a sort of a thundering herd scenario.
- seppel 2y ago
  > What if I don't have no more free DIMM slots but I already have 1 TiB NVMe and I am fine with my workload being finished slightly (or even noticeably) slower as opposed to not being able to do at all? Then you obviously have a workload where having swap make sense (and you could even add swap on the fly in such a case). But that is not typical at all.