[ale] No swap is better than swap

[DjPfulio]

My desktop's get a little swap. This is usually based upon whether I'm going to hibernate or not.  If no hibernation 2gig of swap is fine.  I want the desktop to slow down as RAM is becoming scarce. That's what swap does without running out of memory. On highly limited netbooks that only have 2 gigs of ram ,  I find 4 gig of swap as the minimum required. This is mainly due to browser memory bloat.

 My servers that have well-known workloads don't get any swap usually. If I don't know the workload when first installed, I'll provide a little swap and monitor it.

It really comes down to how well you know the workload for the system. To swap or not to swap is up to you. But there is a trade off, IMHO.

On 4 January 2016 20:05:11 GMT-05:00, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>I run with swap on my servers but I have it small compared to ram. Most
>128GB systems will get 2G swap.
>
>My HPC cluster has swap disabled. The virtual machine hosts have about
>1/3
>as much swap as RAM and always more than any 2 VMs ram total.
>
>Setting swappines is a great way to tune the system for good
>performance.
>On Jan 4, 2016 7:38 PM, "Scott McBrien" <smcbrien at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Running without swap used to be a really risky proposition, but these
>> days, running with out it is fine.  Though oom-killer might do things
>you
>> may not like.  Since it's your desktop, that's probably OK, but on a
>> server, it might cause problems if oom-killer whacked your database
>after
>> killing sshd.  :-)
>>
>> You'll note that most cloud images and the like don't run with a
>swap.
>>
>> -Scott
>>
>> On Jan 4, 2016, at 2:16 PM, Chris Fowler
><cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On my Ubuntu 15.04 running 3.19 I have found that having swap can be
>a
>> real problem.  I think this has a lot to do with Chrome.  I have 8G
>on the
>> machine and when coming back from screen saver or other tasks
>response
>> takes a substantial drop.  I know it is swapping pages. Disabling
>swap
>> solves this problem.  I ran my desktop over a month with no swap and
>forgot
>> to turn it off after a reboot.  I just had to wait 5 minutes so it
>would
>> become responsive again.
>>
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>
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