Ask

892 readers

81 users here now

Rules

Be nice
Posts must be legitimate questions (no rage bait or sea lioning)
No spam
NSFW allowed if tagged
No politics
For support questions, please go to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca

Icon by Hilmy Abiyyu A.

founded 7 months ago

MODERATORS

BoozeOrWater@piefed.social

cloudless@piefed.social

fxomt@piefed.social

Linux users, how much swap do you use? (piefed.zip)

submitted 6 hours ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/ask@piefed.social

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I have 32 gb of RAM but occasionally I run VMs in VMware for learning and experimentation. For good performance, I have about 16gb of swap on my NVMe so I can give a VM up to 8gb of RAM without quality degradation.

For a daily driver that's for gaming and web browsing, if you have 16gb of ram, you probably shouldn't have to alter your swap really.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I have a few instances of Matrix web clients open in my browser, maybe that's where all the RAM goes 😅

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Web browsers are notorious RAM hogs as it is, add several tabs with Matrix clients and yeah, that's probably where a fair amount of it is getting used up.

I suggest either having about half the amount of RAM you have for swap, and if you can spare it on your drive, the whole amount. In other words, if you have 16gb of RAM anywhere from 8gb-16gb if you can spare it. If you have less than 16gb, yeah, you're gonna want to open up as much swap as you can reasonably afford to on your drive.

I have two 1tb NVMes plus two other SSDs, so 16gb is a drop in the bucket for me. It may not be for you and your setup! Always do what makes the most sense within your personal limitations.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds good, thank you for the advice. Do you use a swap file or a swap partition?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I just use a swap file.

This is what I do to alter the size

#Disable swap
sudo swapoff /swapfile
#Increase the file swap size
#This is for 8gb, or 8192mb, change the 8192 to whatever best suits your purposes
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=8192 oflag=append conv=notrunc
#Make the new file a swap file
sudo mkswap /swapfile
#Re-enable the swap
sudo swapon /swapfile
#Check to make sure it worked (Will be under "Swap total")
cat /proc/meminfo

I use Kubuntu (the horror!) so my commands are Debian-oriented. You may need to do it differently if you use Arch or something. Also mind that the bit oflag=append conv=notrunc appends to the original swapfile, I hardly know how to use dd, so I'm not sure of the flags for not appending.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 2 points 3 hours ago

Thanks!