Do you need a swap?

Question

linux

Good evening, dear Habralyudi!

I'm going to install OpenSUSE myself. Already confused - some say a swap is needed, others that it is not needed.
I have 3 GB of RAM. I'm not going to use hibernation, but it is possible to use serious applications (for example, MatLab). Also, it is very likely that I will work with web servers, but for myself (just to learn).

Is a swap needed here? If yes, then to what extent?

PS It is possible that I just do not understand "how it works." In my mind, this is something like the Windows paging file.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

With 3 gigs of RAM, I would definitely make a swap, at least 1-2 gigs.

Answer 2

Swap is always needed. Half of the memory, if there is no hibernate. This should be enough.

Answer 3

The swap is needed simply because the system will flush unusable pages to disk. And she doesn't do it at all when her memory runs out. Just imagine - your browser, photoshop and file manager are working. But since you don’t use them now, you still have (almost) 3 GB of RAM free. Disks are cheap nowadays, so allocating 1-2 GB for swap is nonsense (as one movie comes out in terms of volume).

Answer 4

I wouldn't put the question that way.
Not “needed or unnecessary”, but “with HDDs nowadays on TB or more, is it a pity to allocate a couple of three or even ten gigs?”
It couldn't get any worse, and having a reserve for emergencies even sounds reasonable.

Answer 5

You don't have to swap, but leave 6 GB of unallocated disk space.
If there is a lack of memory or the need to hibernate, then it will not be difficult to turn an unallocated area into a swap partition.
As a bonus, with those 6 GB you can always put another operating system to indulge.

Answer 6

On servers it is needed, on a home computer with 4+ gigabytes of memory it is not needed. For the last couple of years I have not seen a non-zero swap on my computers. On most servers, too, but I leave it there in case of “leaks” of memory, so that the system can at least fork the ssh session.

Answer 7

I would put a swap equal to the OP. When the system crashes, the OP is dumped into a swap, and if your swap has less RAM, then garbage comes out.