My built-in Devil’s Advocate has to ask if that’s really true? Have you got a citation newer than 2 decades old? Frankly, i find it difficult to believe that anyone wouldn’t like to use electron software, for the simple reason that making your SSD suffer is fun.
Edit: in 30 years of administering Linux and (previously) Solaris sytems i’ve never once had to change HDDs or SSDs, so claims of torture are, i opine, exaggerated. i’ll also claim that keeping electron software out of the filesystem is not good for your hygiene.
“I’m not a friggin bear, I don’t hibernate!”
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…
Were you using a HDD for swap? It’s nearly unnoticeable on an NVMe drive.
yep it was HDD, but with the low amount of times I have any OOM issue, I’m way more worried about NVMe flash burning than a random process being killed once every blue moon.
In fact I didn’t mention, but since the advent of flash drives what I’ve done is trying to locate heavy disk writing apps and find alternatives for them, amid disabling many logs.
For swap, it hunts me to think some automatic process I don’t have control over will burn those sweet erase cycles without me noticing just because someone programmed it poorly. I’m way more happy knowing I have some control over it.
And here I am using swap for my self hosted services, some of which use ridiculous amount of ram.
swapfile gang
.rw------- root root 4.0 GB Mon Jun 1 04:10:37 2026 /var/swapDo you hibernate? 🐻
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.)
How many SSDs do you need for it to match the speed of RAM? Can I use this to make cheap RAM?
I just download more ram. Know your tech!!
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.
As well as oom situations, swapping allows the memory to be used more effectively by swapping out anonymous pages that aren’t likely to be used but can’t be dropped.
> linuxmemes
> macos screenshot
ಠ_ಠ
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.
Is this tongue in cheek i swear I cannot tell any longer.
Some swap is beneficial
It’s based on a common meme template. Yeah it’s tongue in cheek and I guess a lot of commenters can’t tell given this is a memes comm
I hope the phone is running PostmarketOS ;)
TBH I’m sure you could configure a linux terminal to look like that, but yeah it looks very default macos to me
Idk. KDE has themes like this but yeah I get it
i’m sure someone has made a KDE theme or a Gnome theme that replicates MacOS, let’s pretend that’s what’s happened.
No
It turns out the computer mostly freezes once you go past 200% RAM used.
Definitely configure swap, but I don’t think there is much benefit of a swap partition over a swap file these days and swap files are trivial to configure.
There are good use cases for swap. I work with very performance sensitive memory hogging applications that tend to process in bursts as incoming batched data arrives. We also have a lot of required background “security” applications.
Having the idle applications move out to swap so that a significant amount of free RAM to allow for the active, real-time applications to expand into is a major boon. RAM is expensive now, so it’s become even more critical to not waste it.
But even in self-hosting at home I take advantage of it since I have a limited number of servers with limited RAM and a bunch of applications and/or docker containers running, many of which don’t need to be active at all times, but if they were all active, would have trouble with the limited RAM. Swap allows for inactive applications to free up RAM for the active ones and leave enough available at all times to allow an application to quickly spin up new jobs.
Anyway, sure, for a simple desktop computer without a bunch of junk background applications running for “security” or whatever, and an overabundance of RAM installed, it’s probably not useful. But for high performance, memory hungry applications with lots of background stuff running, it can be a big help.
That said, there are use cases where the opposite is useful and using a RAM drive is better than writing to disk for cache and temporary logs when you have enough RAM. My opnsense router for instance uses a RAM drive to store cache and logs (logs are mirrored to the NAS for long term storage, so just the local copy is lost on reboot). That system has enough RAM and I’d rather reduce disk wear, and I don’t plan to add too many other applications to that server that it would run low.
Actually, there are more than these. For example, hibernation and/or hybrid suspension. It’s, AFAIK, mandatory to have a swap partition to be able to hibernate and/or hybrid suspend your device.
Its a meme built on stuff like this:
https://gist.github.com/joshenders/c4960cec9c63a7b7d68ffa9543356c43
I also found it useful to do some one-off batch processing of a big file without thinking of chunking and doing too complicated things. Imagine something like a 60GB file in a custom format that need to be deduplicated. It’s easier to just load it all up in memory and do run the algorithm 2-3x slower using a 50GB swapfile than spend hours to complicate the algorithm.
Yep. That’s why it can be nice to just have like an old 1TB drive completely used for swap. Things might get slow once it exceeds your physical memory, but at least it will eventually finish successfully – no out of memory crashes here!
People still use swap partitions instead of swap files?
This. Swap files on LUKS encrypted partition. Also, the swapspace daemon!
I’ve seen so many setups where people encrypt their data but forget to encrypt their swap.
what’s the problem? it’s not like you dump the entire contents of your system’s ram to disk any time use hibernate /s
Even without hibernation, data in apps you have open will end up in the swap if your system is ever RAM-constrained.
Generally it only happens to programs you keep running in the background and might not use for a long time that also don’t have much background activity. For example password managers.
It depends on what you set your swappiness to, too. I think Linux distros still have pretty aggressive defaults that swap more than they probably need to.
that’s what trixie’s netinst defaults to when i set up new desktops using encrypted lvm… root and swap volumes inside that, unlocking together at boot. my use doesn’t hit swap much, so it’s nbd. i just leave it like it is. only where an installer doesn’t support encrypted swap partitions do i use a file or ram-based swap instead.
It’s not as bad with LVM since LVM is more flexible. A swap file does still make it easier to change the size as needed though. If you need more swap, you can spin up a new swap file pretty much instantly while the system is running, without having to repartition. You can have both a swap partition and a swap file active at the same time though.
On systems where the data is encrypted, also encrypting the swap makes sense so I’m glad Debian does that.
Don’t you need swap partitions to be able to use hibernation?
Nah, you can use
resume_offsetinstead.Here’s an example: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/how-to-hibernate-with-btrfs-swapfile-luks2-systemd-boot-dracut/55620/2
Nope, I hibernate with a swap file and it’s in a LUKS partition. Although IIRC that whole setup requires me to use systemd boot.
I do the same and use ugrd. I think dracut would also work.
You just set the resume kernel parameter to the decrypted memory device with the swapfile offset.
As long as the initrd attempts a resume after it decrypted all volumes it’ll work, and the initrd doesn’t even need to understand why and what was resumed from
It’s doable with a swap file instead. But some filesystems are more supportive than others.
For example BTRFS doesn’t support swapfiles over multiple devices (so my raid1c3 spanning 3 differently sized disks for example) and also swapfiles must be completely pre-allocated.
And no matter the filesystem you need to manually tell the kernel device and physical offset for the file via kernel parameters. Which can again be easier on some than on others (also causing the no-multiple-device filesystem problem mentioned above.
btrfs’s handling makes sense. The kernel talks to the disk directly, the file is just a pointer for what range it uses, and a placeholder for the filesystem. Something like raid, balancing, cow, all won’t work because the kernel doesn’t even go through btrfs to change the swap"file".
If you want a proper file as swapfile, with the corresponding overhead, you can make a regular file and mount it via loopback then use it as a swap device.
I don’t use hibernation so I’m not sure.
So you shut your pc down like a caveman when you do hardware upgrades or repairs or move apartments?
Yeah I shut down every day. It boots up fast enough that it’s really not an issue.
“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
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”
I init a ramdisk and put a swap file there and call it L4 cache
64 GB are $1000 so maybe not
I actually did this for a laugh a very, very long time ago. I had upgraded my 75MHz Pentium machine from 8MB to a whopping 40MB, so since I knew it would run fine with just 8, I installed a TSR RAMdisk and told Windows 3.1 to put its swap on that drive.
It worked great, but I decided I’d rather use the memory for other things.
But in more modern times, I’ve literally forced browser caches into memory-based tmpfs to take the load off system disks, which is basically the same thing. And it reduces wear on my hardware.
