I never use Swap regardless of how much Ram I have available because It is rather irrelevant. If you go over your limit the system will crawl to a halt where you'll be forced to kill whatever program you're running anyways, so why bother with swap? Just let it crash "naturally". This also applies to Windows machines, Windows you'll have to forcefully close the program that is going over your limit or whatever you have opened. I guess swap CAN be useful for laptop hibernation and the like?
Is Swap a meme?
Lucas Anderson
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Jacob Rivera
Easton Fisher
yeah, i thought of terry immediately too.
just get rid of virtual memory, so much simpler.
Aaron Hughes
That's the thing, you don't even need swap on zram anymore because the *whole system* won't crash if you go over your memory limit
Camden Johnson
This is good bait but you need to read "In defence of swap" from a Facebook engineer. It's a good read:
chrisdown.name
Wyatt Bell
I'll check it out but as I said, I really don't see the benefit of swap. The system won't crash if you go over your limit, it'll just crash a few processes which would be unusable with swap on, and swapping itself increases a bit of CPU usage and disk writing unnecessarily. Swap never "saved" me from issues
Jeremiah Ortiz
It depends how dogshit your SSD is. Really high end NVME drives can emulate single channel DDR2 RAM performance which doesn't sound all that impressive until you realize most software (ie not gaymes) will rarely move around files bigger than 1GB.
Using an SSD as RAM is exponentially cheaper than buying more RAM.
Adam Perez
>There's also a lot of misunderstanding about the purpose of swap – many people just see it as a kind of "slow extra memory" for use in emergencies, but don't understand how it can contribute during normal load to the healthy operation of an operating system as a whole.
Luis Morris
protip: SSD capacity affects SSD performance after it runs out of SLC cache so keep that in mind if you want to use your SSD as RAM extensively.
Carter Phillips
I don't like SSD's
Just went through it. An interesting read but I'm still not using swap. Still can't see a real benefit of using it instead of letting a few processes crash (which never gets that far in my workflow)
I don't use SSD's at all but I always disable swap on zram regardless of my drive or how much ram I have
Angel Carter
It's pretty nice not having to worry about your computer crashing with no survivors, although SSDs aren't just something for the wealthy elite to enjoy anymore. I can't wrap my head around being proud of being poor but you do you I guess.
Samuel Barnes
>We can choose to swap out rarely-used anonymous memory
>The memory management subsystem will still try to mostly decide whether it swaps file or anonymous pages based on how hot the memory is
How does this work? I don't think there's any way for the kernel to know how frequently some page is accessed short of swapping it out and waiting to see if it page faults. Or am I missing something? It's not like there's a counter or timestamp or something that gets updated every time you read from a page...
James Lopez
You choose
1. Always evicting vfs cache and having your machine grind to a screeching halt
2. Evicting unused or basically unused pages into swap and your system grinds to a screeching halt as it does the above, plus constantly swap pages in and out.
Basically you want at least like a gigabyte of swap for shit so you don't indiscriminately kill vfs cache all the time.
Matthew Scott
I had to set up swap on my home server because the NIC driver (a 2nd hand Mellanox ConnectX 2) was full retard and throwing memory allocation errors even when only ~2-3GB of RAM were in use out of 24GB installed at the time. Once I gave it a bunch of swap the errors stopped, though I still don't actually understand what the fuck that driver is doing. Ironically enough the default driver that Windows uses for this NIC model is perfectly well-behaved and has never caused me any issues.
Carter Scott
Virtual memory really do be a scam. Damn.
Lucas Johnson
It does actually.
Brody White
I run all my setups on green eco friendly HDD's. I don't need more, they perform very well.
I've been running many systems without swap for years, not sure what you mean grinding it to a screeching halt, I never had any issues at all
Understandable, I would consider setting it up in situations like this
Jackson Adams
I mean to be fair HDDs are still faster than all the dramless chinkshit SSDs being punked out due to laggy single CPU core controllers having to rely on the NAND flash itself for FTL. Hell most chromebooks don't even get that, they use eMMC which is basically a SoC version of a flash drive.
Nicholas Cook
It does what?
Camden Gray
Holy crap this anime brings memories of my akward as hell high school years
Fuck you OP
Sebastian Murphy
I am literally Kouko irl
Nathan Roberts
Oh nevermind, there's an "accessed bit" in the page table that gets flipped by the hardware whenever a page gets read. I think I knew about that once but forgot, I see now.
Mason Morgan
To be fair I do know that not having any swap at all makes my Ram usage a little bit higher due to caching and it isn't the most efficient usage of it but I'd rather have the system kick in and kill processes whenever I run out of memory than having to wait hours with the programs on an unusable state until the swap partition runs out and the Kernel kicks in. Also most "swappinness" values add unnecessary cpu usage and disk writing unless you keep it very low...