[jerf]

"And you're smart to do so."

Finally, that's the first comment I get, instead of someone extolling the virtues of swap and babbling warmed-over 1990s rules of thumb about "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file" as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process, let alone 8GB.

[Waywocket]

>Finally, that's the first comment I get, instead of someone extolling the virtues of swap and babbling warmed-over 1990s rules of thumb about "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file" as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process, let alone 8GB.

Those people have doubtless misunderstood the point of swap. You should have a swapfile/partition because it allows allocated but currently unused memory (from an application which keeps data hanging around which is not needed for most of it's working life, or an application which simply leaks) to be dumped to long term storage, thus freeing memory for its real use: page cache. Sweet, sweet page cache.

I'm always happy to see a few tens, even a couple of hundred MB of swap in use, because it means that some application had some unused data hanging around for so long that to leave it there would mean my machine having to read from disk more frequently, which would be Bad.

[requinot59]

> "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file"

Don't listen the parrots that repeat something that ceases to be true at least 10 years ago. Swap used to be a useful hack, it is not anymore.

> as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process

Well said ;-)

[cookiecaper]

Hibernation requires a large swap space, doesn't it? Last I knew it did, perhaps you can compress it now.

[jerf]

Yes, and it may seem a merely semantic difference, but there's still a difference between "swap space" and "hibernation backing". One I'm willing to wait for while it fills, the other, I am not. The kernel may not distinguish, but I do. When I don't care about hibernation I just remove it.

[cookiecaper]

Right, swapoff is totally acceptable imo if you're having trouble with swap. I was commenting on how "double the size of RAM" is a bad or outdated guideline. There's been a few times where I've regretted not making my swap space big enough, sometimes when getting a RAM upgrade and wanting to do hibernation, etc. My disk isn't super pressed for space so in my mind there's no real reason to be stingy, and then you don't have to grow/shrink partitions if an upgrade occurs after the initial disk setup.