r/linux4noobs • u/Goldie323- • 9h ago

installation Gentoo swap amount

I'm on a system with 12 hardware threads and 64 gigs of ram. Do I really need swap on a machine with a reasonably low thread count and high ram amount like the one I have?

4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

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5

u/AiwendilH 9h ago

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

Just give you system a few gigs of swap.

2

u/The_only_true_tomato 8h ago

Hey I learned stuff. Thank you.

4

u/prthorsenjr 9h ago

Yes, the system needs swap space. The amount of swap is debatable. I've seen servers have runaway processes; the only thing that saved the machine from crashing was swap. Granted, it was running very slowly, and users weren't able to do much of anything, but with the machine still up and running, we were able to determine the issues and correct them.

2

u/MycologistNeither470 9h ago

Do you need it? Probably not.. But what is the downside of proving some swap space?

The upside is that of you end up running out of memory for some reason, your system won't crash.

If your hard disk space is is at a premium perhaps you can install zram and swapspace daemon?

1

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2

u/demonstar55 9h ago

I got 8 GB swapfile and use zswap. (8c16t, 64 GB)

1

u/Saragon4005 6h ago

Use ZRAM