@qwertydotplus@mastodon.social
2026-09-20 08:51 UTC
i'm pretty liberal with my swap usage, since i do large scale testing with VMs and run several services in containers. it ends up being much more efficient to let things start up and have them ready to load out of swap, rather than start them from scratch on demand. for my particular use case, this warrants having 64 GiB of SSD swap space in addition to the 64 GiB of RAM in my system, because having any of that RAM wasted on VMs that aren't running ends up making a given run take ~40% longer.
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@qwertydotplus@mastodon.social 2026-09-20 09:48
in general, though, you shouldn't ever be treating swap as emergency memory (and if your system is using it as emergency memory, then you're already thrashing, and no amount of swap will save you). swap is just the place application data is supposed to go when it's not being actively used. and if your processes are built particularly well, most of their data should not be in active use.