Swap partition

[Andrew1971]

Hi All
Not sure if this is the right place. So here goes do you really need swap partition when you have 7.5gig memory. The most i have used is about 1.3gig off mem.
The reason i ask is my little pc has been upgraded with a SSD drive. The SSD drive has made a big performance difference to a spinning HDD glad i did.
LMDE 2 was the only distro that made every thing work.
Many Thank's
Andrew

[jimallyn]

I have 12 GB of RAM, and still have a swap partition. And it actually gets used once in a while. The thing I have found that really soaks up the RAM is Faebook. Most of their pages are filled with scripts, and that uses a lot of memory. If it weren't for that, I probably wouldn't bother with swap.

[MintyO]

Some use swap partition and some a swap file. I haven't found much agreed consensus what is best or what size, or do you need it because like you say, modern ram sizes.. Only thing I've come to believe as agreed upon, is that you need a swap (and be the size of ram) if you want to use the hibernate function.

[JerryF]

I think it depends on what you're going to do on an everyday basis. With 8GB of RAM, I turned off swap and I get along fine without it (I don't use Hibernate).

Code: Select all

swapoff -a

then commented out the swap partition line in the fstab file at /etc/fstab using a #. You can actually delete the line. Here's an example from mine:

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=095099ae-92ff-4f5f-9f67-76027dadf535 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=3553b020-bd8e-4022-9177-bfba5713f889 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation
# UUID=d5b82220-1035-4e20-a37f-99ae9f1cd1c3 none swap sw 0 0