cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51845693
Credit to @ryanc@infosec.exchange
I just did the graphic
What, you don't have your SWAP set to 1TB Google Drive share?
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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Go the other way: create a RAM disk.
Remember when they said “swap should be 2 times the amount of RAM”.
Why would I waste 128 GiB of storage for nothing?
They stopped saying that a long time ago. It became something like 2x ram until beyond 4GB then it was something more sane.
Did the same thing but some apps are designed with that in mind and I had worse performance so had to do a swap file again
Never have I ever heard about apps that need a swap file to operate normally.
Docker.
Only half-joking.
Me neither but creating one fixed my performance issues so I figured that was the issue. TBF it was a pagefile under windows so it might be a windows specific quirk but the main point still stands
Yeah, your first mistake was using Windows and expecting performance.
Hey, "bad performance" is still a kind of performance!
That's why whenever I've upgraded PC I always tried to double or more than double the amount of RAM my last PC had. So this last upgrade I went from 16 GiB to 64 GiB. DDR4 though. I doubt I'll be able to double it next time with these prices though.
I know right now you're stuck exclusively using swap, but If you work hard and apply yourself, you may one day be able to afford one whole gigabyte of ram without going more than five figures into debt.
pagefile.sys has entered the chat.
Please, for the love of who ever you hold in high esteem, use swap. See: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html Now I don't really like the whole "Heres an article from some rando to prove my point" thing, but anecdotally, the article does line up with my experience (with 32 gigs of system memory). Namely, when I went without swap I experienced frequent system lock-ups, when I added swap on zram, lock ups still happened but less frequently, and when I eventually changed swap on zram to disk swap on the recommendation of this article lock ups never happened again.
To add some nuance to this, do not use ZRAM in combination with swap. There's ZSWAP for that which does what you would expect, without clogging up your RAM and gracefully handling a backing device. (ZRAM is just another block device for the kernel, so you will get LRU inversion if it fills up and you have another layer of swap on disk. Meaning your cold pages will be needlessly stuck in zram.)
Yeah, the same person who wrote the article I linked above also wrote one on zram vs zswap, which I think is also a good read: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
Use Swap FILE though.. Not Swap Partition
You'll have to pry my swap partition out of my cold, dead hands.
I’ll do whatever the fuck I want, thank you.
Sorry, my 8 GB study laptop freezes all the time on Librewolf and it has a Bay Trail chip. I gotta have it.
You must have a bajillion tabs open, until recently I used an old thinkpad with 8gb of soldered ram and never ran into ram issues with only librewolf running. It was a different story though when I started qGIS and a couple of libreoffice instances.
I usually have VSCode, Discord and MusicBee (with Wine) open in the background, but yeah I just open a bunch of tabs sometimes. I did make a swap file and not a partition however.
And if you need swap just do a swap file
If you need swap, you probably should look at the tradeoffs of a file vs. a partition, or maybe even adding another entire disk.
But if you don't know if you'll need it, it's because you won't.
Lol, I stopped swapping when I got enough RAM to never need swap
Even if you don't run out of RAM your kernel will use swap to defragment your memory. Usually you end up with gaps in memory that are too small to effectively allocate as programs open, close or stay running over time.
That's ok, I have enough RAM that I'm not particularly worried about that either. I also don't leave my computer on all night, I like to be nice to my tech, also locks my drives
Everytime I install a fresh OS I setup swap when I feel I'm having OOM issues or random freezes, it's just creating one 16GB file and enabling it as swap. Much easier than going to read now about zswap zram or whatever I'm "supposed" to be using.
I miss Intel optane
dont worry Samsung zNAND-O is coming to fill the gap at unaffordable prices.
Does it make a system more stable or less stable? What about under proxmox?
If you run out of RAM and have swap disabled, then some program must be killed to make room. That's handled by OOM (out of memory).
Whatever got killed might have been important, and you as the user don't get to pick at that point.
My skyrim modpack need 60GB of Swap Space :(
Great send up of Swap!
Swap is great though. And to point out again that there are ratings on quality SSDs for the lifetime writes. Pull up the data sheet and look for "DWPD", which is "Disk Writes Per Day". Typical numbers for good swap drives are 1 and 3. If DWPD is not listed, then plan for frequent drive failures if using heavy, heavy swap (like for ZFS swap drives (Yes, these are different from a OS swap partition)).
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the DWPD statistic.
I usually make swap partitions on hdds tho never on ssds. I can happily spare ~10GB hdd space in this memory drought.
nerddd
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Meanwhile here I am partitioning 20Gb of SWAP because I want 0 chance of an OOM moment.
Oh, you mean the hibernation space? ZZzzzzz...
I often use FreeBSD on a system with 2 gigs of ram. I WISH swap was useful. OOM killer is so overzealous the thing just kills whatever before even touching swap.
Maybe tweak the swappiness?
As far as I can tell that's not possible on FreeBSD. The vm.swappiness parameter doesn't exist there.
I have a laptop with 16GB of ram and discovered that if I connect an external display the available ram goes down to 12... but I'd hate to pay 32 GB as if they were 256 GB, I've resigned to keeping 1 (one) instance of intellij opened at a time