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  • PrefersAwkward@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldunused is wasted
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    6 months ago

    Using swap isn’t always a sign you need more RAM. Typically, if you use a computer for a while or have a lot of IO operations going on, Linux will decide to swap some things to make more room for cache.

    Sometimes Linux just finds that you have a bunch of inactive app memory and it can swap that out to cache way more stuff. That’s just good memory management, but it’s not worth buying more RAM over



  • I wouldn’t put swap on an SD card, no. Even if it had an NVME, it seems like putting up at least a double-digit percent would be more effective than 1%.

    Also, since 6.1, swap has been a lot better, with MGLRU. ChromeOS gets away with paltry amounts of RAM due to swapping. So classic overcommitting seems fine as long as you don’t run into situations where more RAM is active at once than is available by hardware.


  • I think the question is: if a person is going to make such a tiny swap, why even use swap?

    Such a small swap is unlikely to save a system from memory problems and it’s does not seem likely to make a noticeable difference in performance when it’s only able to swap out small amounts of memory.

    Why wouldn’t one just put in larger ZRAM or a larger Swap with a reduced swapiness?

    If I have a raspberry pi with 1 GB ram, I don’t think a 2 MB swap is worth bothering with.