Swap memory: SSD or HDD?
Swap memory: SSD or HDD?
Hello Comrades,
Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I'm now I'm intrigued and I'd like to play around a bit more.
I'm thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I'll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won't be installing anything that I can't get to work on Linux.
Question about storage and swap memory.
I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.
The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?
And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them 'share' the swap partition?
Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?
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Ideally, swap should go on the fastest storage you have. Also ideally, you want to have enough memory that you never need to swap anyway. If you have enough ram, you don't really need swap at all.
You can definitely share swap partitions between dual booted OSes. You can even share home directories if you wanted.
No obvious additional risks that I can think of.
If you have enough ram, you don't really need swap at all.
This isn't really true. Swap is important for things other than acting as a memory reserve. Even if it was only used that way, it can still improve performance by paging out unused memory (such as from application startup that then isn't used).
There are other benefits too. This link goes into details.
I've seen and read that before, and while I don't have any hard data, anecdotally, my machine with 64GB ram does not have a swap file or partition and runs just fine. I have had similar results on a 32GB laptop.
The link doesn't really go into any specific real world use cases where swap is critical, and mostly discusses the memory contention issues. Still, worth a read for anything thinking about turning swap on or off.
I don't think the point is that swap is critical. Whether that is true will depend on your workload and hardware. But the point is it makes memory management better and more efficient. Whether you notice a difference in performance or not is again dependent on your workload & hardware. I personally see no reason to not dedicate a couple gigs to swap even with lots of memory on a personal system.
Yeah, that's fair. I have always had fairly limited storage, due to dual booting, so wasting space on swap always felt pointless. I guess it's a bit arbitrary :D
womp womp :)