Question about Swap Partition

[Stevo]

Thanks for the quick reply.

So, no, MX Linux will NOT make a swapfile if I have no Swap Partition.
And No I do not absolutely need a Swap Partition.

So, what are the drawbacks of not having a Swap Partition on a machine with 8 GB of ram?

I ask, as my boot drive is SSD, so constant swapping reduces lifespan of the drive.

You should be fine because I never seen MX Linux even reach 4GB of memory usage. The only drawback is if you use much more memory intensive programs than I do your computer will run into a roadblock from running out of memory. Not good. You can always add more RAM. I highly recommend no swap file with a SSD. The only question is what will happen to the swapness setting when there is no Swap file? Swapness should be set to 0.

You can easily eat up 16 GB if you compile certain packages using twelve threads...Probably opening very large image files for editing in Gimp, too.

[Mauser]

Thanks for the quick reply.

So, no, MX Linux will NOT make a swapfile if I have no Swap Partition.
And No I do not absolutely need a Swap Partition.

So, what are the drawbacks of not having a Swap Partition on a machine with 8 GB of ram?

I ask, as my boot drive is SSD, so constant swapping reduces lifespan of the drive.

You should be fine because I never seen MX Linux even reach 4GB of memory usage. The only drawback is if you use much more memory intensive programs than I do your computer will run into a roadblock from running out of memory. Not good. You can always add more RAM. I highly recommend no swap file with a SSD. The only question is what will happen to the swapness setting when there is no Swap file? Swapness should be set to 0.

You can easily eat up 16 GB if you compile certain packages using twelve threads...Probably opening very large image files for editing in Gimp, too.

Thanks. Makes sense but I didn't know that much memory could be used up but is good to know. What would happen if swapness is set to 1 like the OP and all the memory is used up then MX Linux is looking for a swap partition but it's not there?

[Colargole]

Some people had system freezes without Swap partition so it's a good idea to create one anyway.

Indeed, on Linux 19.2 I did not install any swap partition and I do have system freezes on a regular basis.
I'm migrating to 21.1 with a swap partition.
PC is a well-loved HP Pro 3130 with Core i5 and 8GB RAM.

[entropyfoe]

Drive space is cheap these days. SSD endurance has long gone away as a significant concern.

Even with 32 G of RAM, I make a 33G swap partition, though it is rarely used as I set VM swappiness to either 1 or 10.

No crashes, very stable system with uptimes 30-60 days easily.
I never want a lack of RAM to cause a crash or lock-up.

And 16G of RAM can get eaten up with Firefox ! My wife's MX 19.4 install runs low on RAM sometimes because she doesn't like to use noscript. So sometimes I see isolated web processes ( tabs) consuming 5-10% of the memory in top.
I usually kill those tabs and reload them after which their memory is more well behaved. I think it is scripts running advertising, but a gig or RAM for a web page ! insane!

I run no script and never see such high memory usage for a tab. [Now I do have a hundred tabs open sometimes.... ]

[Eadwine Rose]

@Colargole Please pay attention to how old threads are. Don't dig old ones from the trenches. This one is three years ago. Thanks.



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