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In defence of swap: common misconceptions (chrisdown.name)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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To be clear, I don't blame the poster of this comment at all for the content of their post – this is accepted as "common knowledge" by a lot of Linux sysadmins and is probably one of the most likely things that you will hear from one if you ask them to talk about swap. It is unfortunately also, however, a misunderstanding of the purpose and use of swap, especially on modern systems.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Great article, thanks for posting! Worth noting that swap is also used for tmpfs partitions. Meaning that if you don't have any swap, temporary files in /tmp will use your actual physical RAM. That's probably not what you want.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Except for sometimes when it is beneficial to store tmpfs files on RAM for speed or saving your SSD some unnecessary writes.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Profile_on_RAM is a good example.