In defence of swap: common misconceptions (chrisdown.name)

submitted 2 years ago by agilob@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

To be clear, I don't blame the poster of this comment at all for the content of their post – this is accepted as "common knowledge" by a lot of Linux sysadmins and is probably one of the most likely things that you will hear from one if you ask them to talk about swap. It is unfortunately also, however, a misunderstanding of the purpose and use of swap, especially on modern systems.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Balinares@pawb.social 19 points 2 years ago

Great article, thanks for posting! Worth noting that swap is also used for tmpfs partitions. Meaning that if you don't have any swap, temporary files in /tmp will use your actual physical RAM. That's probably not what you want.

[-] gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

Except for sometimes when it is beneficial to store tmpfs files on RAM for speed or saving your SSD some unnecessary writes.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM is a good example.

[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I think people are a bit overly afraid of SSD lifespan. I've been using my SSD heavily for like 5 years, and it's a QLC drive which everyone told me would die very easily. Turns out it's still only used like 10% of its writes

this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024

98 points (94.5% liked)

Linux

11104 readers

762 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

anzo@programming.dev

dwraf_of_ignorance@programming.dev