You can, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from swap.
I’m sure there may be situations where swap is beneficial. But honestly i just don’t think i would even notice and i guess it depends on what you are doing.
I do fibre optic.
Edit: No swap needed!
+1 for zram.
I use it on everything. Even my computer with 64gb ram has 8gb zram. Everyone needs swap.
I think it depends on a personal use case. Only you can answer that question. If your system never uses more than 75 or 85% of your RAM, then you don’t need a swap file in my opinion. Obviously it has it’s advantages and is needed for hibernation but a lot of desktops will run fine without out it unless it’s needed.
That’s what I setup
Top says I have 7.56Go of RAM
How do we measure “uses” here, does that include caching?
seems not everyone reads it so i repost the link
I have read the post, twice, and i’m convinced that swap is indeed a handy tool. I currently don’t use any swap with 32GB of RAM i thought it would not be necessary but apparently i’m wrong.
What remain is if you do want to have swap how big does it have to be? The opinions are from like 6GB until half the ram (without hibernation that is)
@dalto speaks of a few GB in this thread:
Any advice in my case?
For the record i have never had a OOM on my system
Yeah, that’s not a RAM issue, then. Those apps, whether altogether or individually, shouldn’t be slow on that amount of RAM. There’s something else that isn’t correctly configured, whether it’s user-based or ISO/Repo-based is the question.
If you haven’t used swap yet - esp. without a dedicated swap partition or file - use zram. Just go with the default which is afaik half of the installed RAM with systemd/zram. You commit to nothing long term and are able to change it easily.
Use the system normally and observe if the swap is used and how much of it. And if actually none of that swap is ever used you don’t waste any resources nor have to make any decision.
Yes, #9. I’ve ran with and without a Swap partition. Since I’ve ran into more problems without, and since this laptop has only 4GB (3.65G Conky) of non-upgradable RAM, the last time I did a wipe and reinstall, I decided to throw in a 8096MB (7.91G Conky) Swap partition. Even with only 40% of RAM used, I see that I’m also using 9% of Swap.
I think that with everything closed, I had like 5Go used (I’m using KDE)
From my experience a 1:2 ratio of “used RAM” vs cache is a healthy ratio for a properly speced desktop system. After that it should hit swap. Everything above 1:1 I consider memory starved. Not that you’re necessarily going to notice it for a long while esp. with a fast flash drive, but there’s performance left on the table.
My memory is maxed out at 128GB. My system was crashing due to running out of memory when running multiple instances of a Python data processing script, so I added 128GB of swap, and that took care of the problem.
Since I’ve switched from zfs to btrfs for my large data stores, memory hasn’t been as big of an issue. ZFS was happily gobbling up half my ram for its cache. Attempts to make it use a sane amount were ineffective, but as I said, adding the swap took care of the issue.
Yes, in my experience zfs wants to put EVERYTHING in cache, quite aggressively.
Most average users are not doing this though.
I bet indeed.. average joe will not feel see stumble over an issue if there is now swap in any way.. like normal usage browsing yt streaming office and casual gaming .. but it is an improvement for some users.. and if you want to get the best out of the system. Or you are in the need of doing some advanced computing.