
Swapfiles by default in Ubuntu - reddotX
http://blog.surgut.co.uk/2016/12/swapfiles-by-default-in-ubuntu.html
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pixl97
Eh, I remember years ago on the LKML that Linus gave a few reason why you
should run a swap file. Those were much older kernels then we are using now,
so the question is, have the reasons changed for wanting swap in the first
place.

First, swap wasn't about 'extra' memory in modern large memory devices, it was
about being able to evict some pages from running memory that rarely need to
get used, leaving more space for filesystem cache. Memory defragmentation was
another reason why some swap should exist. OOM handling works differently on
systems with and without swap.

Myself, depending on the amount of disk space I have, I tend to only give the
system 1 to 2GB of swap space. This allows a temporary overcommit to occur in
smaller programs without OOM killer. If a service trys to allocate many
gigabytes of memory it gets killed without ruining system performance, and it
probably should be killed anyway as something has gone terribly wrong at that
point.

