
Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space - Supermighty
https://haydenjames.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/
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ktpsns
From my Linux desktop experience, I could not disagree more. When my 16GB
ThinkPad runs out of memory, the OOM Killer blinks for a fraction of a second
to kill the faulty process. If I had a swap partition, disk IO would render
the system unusable for hours before the OOM Killer kicks in. Also, I don't
want my SSD lifetime be sacrificed for a neglectable amount of better RAM
usage -- on the desktop, I either run out of memory quickly (because my code
makes mistakes) or I never feel the reach for 16GB of RAM.

On the server the situation is very different, and a few GB Swap on a spinning
disc might be a good idea even when having 128GB of RAM.

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fs2
Disagree, on most of my systems I don't even have swap partition anymore. The
few times I need it, I can just create a swap file on the fly and have any
amount of swap memory.

Performance problems the author describes can be fixed 90% of the time by
changing the dirty_background_ratio in the kernel as described here:

[https://linuxmaster.cc/s/improve_performance_and_fix_unrespo...](https://linuxmaster.cc/s/improve_performance_and_fix_unresponsive_systems_under_heavy_diskio_load)

