• cannedtuna@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Shit did I botch it? I made this on my phone and the toot I copied the script from was just text. Wanted to make it look more interesting so I found this site that let you make the windows. I just went with what I thought looked best.

  • 87Six@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    All I know is that I had 16GB RAM and 4GB swap and I used to get crashes sometimes.

    Set that fucker to 32GB out of spite, now no crashes. No idea why that helped. But I guess I do have like 15 tabs open on the regular (web dev)

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “Unresizeable block device at end of disk”

    Classically the swap partition was located at the physical middle of the drive so that on average, no matter where the heads where, the swap partition wasn’t far away

  • Zenorbi@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I used to be this guy. We have huge amount of memory in our storage server. Why would we need swap? Well, once the system started killing programs I read up on swap and how the system handles its caches, especially ZFS ARC.

    Short version is that while the system can evict its caches syncronously, it can only async notify ZFS that it should also shrink its caches, but the out-of-memory killer will start killing before ZFS and its kernel counterpart can start to free up memory.

    A tiny bit of swap completely solved this, since swapping is sync for the kernel and the OOM killer will wait for it.

  • rem26_art@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    Building a PC in 2026 be like “I cant afford RAM, but I can use a whole TB hard disk I shucked from an old WD external as swap and maybe my PC will feel modern”

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialBanned
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    2 months ago

    Yes, swap partitions are shit.

    The real hotness is swap drives.

    Just the use that your old 64GB SSDs were waiting for!

    (Fun fact: in Linux, if you have multiple swap partitions mounted, the kernel will automatically use striping (like RAID) in order to read and write from them as fast as possible. If you have multiple small SSDs used for swap, the read/write speed from swap can actually become pretty fast.)

  • topperharlie@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Everyone defending swap like crazy in the comments… so let me give a counter argument specifically for desktop:

    Many years ago I stopped using swap on all my computers (I exclusively use linux) and the reason is: every time anything regarding interactivity went to swap, my system would freeze and literally become unusable for a really long time until I killed something. Since I got tired if that behaviour I decided I prefer for random shit to die but my computer still be usable.

    It wasn’t very often, but I don’t get OOM killer often either (as in I don’t remember the last time it happened and I use linux every day for both work and fun), and the freezing situation was way more annoying, to the point I sometimes ended up cold switching off the computer. I’m surprised on how many people run out of memory constantly. I guess you all are just using linux for servers and have crazy processing of infinite data…

  • motruck@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Swap is there an emergency relief for when a runaway process starts to eat all the resources. The system gets slow the user says hey what’s that? They look and see oh wow this one process is really eating a lot of resources that’s bad, can I kill it or do I need to gracefully try to shut it down. Swap buys you time when it could matter. When you don’t have swap OOM killer takes out whatever it wants and for a desktop user that may not be that big of a deal but for a server the database is likely the first target that is taken out.

    • nullptr@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      you misunderstand the meme (of course it doesn’t help either); because the alternative isn’t “no swap”, but rather “use a swap file instead of swap partition”

      • motruck@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        Hrmm. How does that change the SSD problem if you are using a file on the SSD? I reread the meme. Maybe I’m too blurry eyed still but I don’t see that coming through.

    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      If you(or your distro) use zram then the zram usage may also count as swap in resource monitors. For me this was the case when i saw swap usage where it is clearly not needed to swap. You can check it with swapon commands.

      Other reason is that more frequently accesed files may be cached to ram and less important stuff gets swapped. But if you notice swap being used while total ram usage including cached is much lower than total, then its probably zram(and it does (Edit:)not write to disk so dont worry about that)