alt Hacker NewsCurious, How much swap have you personally allocated on your personal setup?
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On systems with 32/64/128 GB of ram, I'll typically have a 1GB or 2GB swap. Just so that the system can page out here and there to run optimally. Depending on the system, swap is typically either empty or just has a couple hundred MB kicking around.
Windows: I set min size to whatever is necessary to make RAM+swap add up to ~2 GBytes per CPU thread, to avoid problems with parallel Visual Studio builds. (See, e.g., https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/precompiled-header-pc...) Performance is typically fine with ~0.75+ GBytes RAM per job, but if the swapfile isn't preconfigured then Windows can seemingly end up sometimes refusing to grow it fast enough. Safest to configure it first
macOS: never found a reason not to just let it do whatever it does. There's a hard limit of ~100 GBytes swap anyway, for some reason, so, either you'll never run out, or macOS is not for you
Linux: I've always gone for 1x physical RAM, though with modern RAM sizes I don't really know why any more
16gb.
Fwiw you’ll see technical reasons for swap being a bad idea on servers. These are valid. Virtualised servers don’t really have great ways to make swap work.
On a personal setup though there’s no reason not to have swap space. Your main ram gets to cache more files if you let the os have some space to place allocated but never actually used objects.
As in ‘I don’t use swap because i don’t use all my ram’ isn’t valid since free ram caches files on all major OS’s. You pretty much always end up using all your ram. Having swap is purely a win, it lets you cache even more.
My work laptop currently has 96GB of RAM. 32 of it is allocated to the graphics portion of the APU. I have 128GB (2x) of SWAP allocated, since I sometimes do big FPGA Synthesizations, which take up 50GB of RAM on its own. Add another two IDEs and a browser, and my 64GB or remaining RAM is full.
64GB RAM, zero swap. Until recently RAM was cheap so swap made little sense when you could simply buy more RAM.
Why was this downvoted? I’m generally curious what current recommendations for swap are too!
Edit: oh and I don’t have an actual personal system with swap configuration on it anymore to give my own answer anymore either.
Zero. My office workstation has 48 GB of RAM, my home computer has 64 (I went a bit overboard). I have very bad memories of swap thrashing and the computer becoming totally unresponsive until I forced a reset; if I manage to fill up so much RAM, I very much prefer the offending process to die instead of killing the whole computer.