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I’m not advocating for anything but for distros to stop recommending swap partitions. I advocate for right-sizing your hardware to predicable workloads and not using swap at all. On your pet servers or desktops where the workload is experimental or wildly unpredictable, swap files make more sense over partitions.

"I advocate for right-sizing your hardware to predicable workloads and not using swap at all."

You do realize in the current semiconductor-short code-bloat-heavy economy we're in right now that your advocation would be prohibitively expensive for many people, yes?

At least, the gaming community would basically need to be grabbing $5K systems just because of garbage AI companies and crappy inefficient 'AI' upscaling algorithms with garbage engines that insist on doing intensive rendering optimization and upscaling on low-res models when simply rendering the regular model is faster (I'm looking square at you, UE5.) You know, that kind of thing. Plus the open world streaming, yea that's about already equal to a massive swapfile just for world data.

I think your advocation is very short on vision given current realities.


This is a mechanism post not a policy post. If you want to see my take on swap, see my last response on that gift.

Swap is not recommended on servers where responsiveness and determinism are more important than failure recovery of any one server.

I love this kind of stuff. Great share

Looks like this was added in util-linux 2.40. Works with btrfs correctly too! Added.

This recommendation is based off the current implementation.

See:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/827751b699b79a6e56998...

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/827751b699b79a6e56998...

The thread is quoted to show that they have been functionally equivalent for several decades and yet distros continue to push outdated recommendations.


> yet distros continue to push outdated recommendations

Is it possible perhaps that this advice doesn't apply equally to all situations? Is it the best for people on ZFS? Is it the best for distributions that have their own kernels builds?

I'm not saying it's a bad default, or that people should avoid it, just that it's likely not "the absolute best no questions asked" regardless of the situation, that was what I was trying to point out with my previous comment.


+1. This test and its conclusions are flawed. See CAV/CLV

you love to see it

What subsystem are you referring to?

I wrote this years ago before LLMs made it easy to validate guesswork. I’ll update! Good call

LLMs are guesswork. You have to validate them, not the other way around.

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