• marcos@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Swap is not intended to save a system from memory problems. And absolutely not fit for that purpose.

    And if you are using that memory, it will make a noticeable difference in performance.

    But for it to have any impact at all, you need the default (high) swapiness. If you reduce it, that partition will become useless.

    Anyway, I don’t recommend you put any swap at your PI’s SD card.

    • PrefersAwkward@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I wouldn’t put swap on an SD card, no. Even if it had an NVME, it seems like putting up at least a double-digit percent would be more effective than 1%.

      Also, since 6.1, swap has been a lot better, with MGLRU. ChromeOS gets away with paltry amounts of RAM due to swapping. So classic overcommitting seems fine as long as you don’t run into situations where more RAM is active at once than is available by hardware.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        4 GB are 4 GB, it doesn’t matter how much memory you have at total.

        The only usage of swap where you should even look at your RAM size is for on-disk sleeping. And most people don’t do this anymore.