On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 5:39 PM, L A Walsh <suse@tlinx.org> wrote:
When I had swap -- if it was ever used, it was a mandate: GET MORE RAM. You'll waste far less time in your life not swapping. The extra cost for ram is more than compensated by the extra time you'll have in your life.
Not always true. When you have already maxed out your system, you are stuck spending money on a new system rather than just more RAM. And, at least for me, work is how I get money, and work takes away from the things I want to do in my life. It's always a balance. For the "Average" user, 4-8GB and a small swap space is probably plenty. For people who depend on their computer for their livelihood, then it makes sense to invest in a larger, more capable system as you outgrow what you have. The laptop I'm using now only has 3GB RAM, and a 3.1GB swap(for hibernating to save battery life). Right now, I'm only using about 100MB for swap, and really the only program I have an issue with when it comes to swapping is Firefox and a lot of tabs open. When that gets too much, I just kill it and re-start and prune out the tabs(reloading them as I need them). I really only use this for internet, document work, and watching movies, so I don't need as much RAM. Actually, I just sold the 32GB that was in my server and went back to 8GB because I never used more than 8GB, so it wasn't doing anything useful, and I managed to get out of it what I had in it(which is kinda rare these days). I do generally recommend more RAM if it can be upgraded and it is in the budget. No matter what you use for swap, it is going to be slower than RAM. Dollar for dollar, RAM makes the most difference in an upgrade in most cases over processor or drives. If you are not maxed out. I have an old P3 server with 6GB RAM. I made a RAM drive in the 4-6GB area for swap, and that seemed to help(since processes were swapped out via PAE anyway), but I don't really know if it made that much of a difference. Just my 2 cents. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org