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As an admin, I prefer no swap on prod machines because I’d rather have the oom killer kill a process that will automatically be brought back up or replaced than grind everything to a crawl swapping. A dead process can be restarted. A swapped to death server can be challenging to even get into.
Nobody’s mentioning putting laptops into deep sleep where no battery power is being used.
I think the biggest reason that’s fallen out of favor is that normal sleep now works pretty well on most systems. It adds wear to your SSD to do that.
What do you mean by normal sleep and pretty well? My XPS isn’t that old and it drinks from battery while sleeping quite fast, 12h and 50% goes down.
My older Dell laptop only drains 1-2% per hour on normal sleep which is also not acceptable, I can’t leave it like that over the weekend.
I’ve always had bad experiences with Dell hardware. The battery life of there devices doesn’t seem to last more than a few hours and the batteries where out.
I have a System76 laptop and I can close the lid for a full day and not have issues. The only thing powered is the ram so it lasts a long time.
Swap is super helpful if you’re running a web server on a 1GB RAM 2 CPU Linode instance!!
Be careful with that
I think some providers prevent full usage of a VPS in the ToS
I pay for the whole VPS, I use the whole VPS.
In this case the web server will temporarily exceed 1GB RAM and crash. It’s usually hovering around 700MB. I configured 4GB swap but I haven’t seen it use more than 1.5GB. I honestly doubt they would even have a way to know, but thanks for the warning.
I guess you will find out
Its probably fine. Just make sure you have a backup outside of the cloud provider.
Are you sure? Because that’s fucking dumb. If it was alà ISP, then it is understandable. Most ISP CANNOT GUARANTEE the maximum advertised speed, not outright violating ToS when you are able to use those full speed. Big difference there.
It depends on weither you are on the shared CPU plan. I’m quite sure but I think they may have ram limits along with CPU limits.
Maybe it is a violation when you are doing it all the time? Like, 24/7 you are using the whole resources available. Then yeah, I could see it.
I was forced to enable swap because it I run out of RAM without swap then 95% of the time my laptop hard reboots. Adding a ton of swap fixed it.
My next issue is that sometimes it just hard-freezes. Zero warning, under no load, I can’t even move the mouse. Linux on the desktop!
Can you upgrade the ram? Ram is cheaper than it was
Yeah that was the first thing I did - 16 to 32GB but apparently the hardware doesn’t support more. At least that’s what the IT guys told me and it isn’t worth fighting them.
Seems a bit shit of the hardware to me. I bought a second hand desktop for very cheap and it came with 128GB which seems like a more reasonable amount for a professional programmer…
16GB should be fine for just about anything. It is fine in 8GB and you probably can get away with 4GB. You need to check what is using up all the ram as there is a serious problem somewhere.
I’ve only really seen 64+ on servers since that’s a bit insane for desktop use. 128GB is what you use for ZFS file servers and stuff like that.
Can you post your specs? Also I would double check that you didn’t mismatch memory timings. You can mix brands as long as the speed and pattern are the same. It sounds a lot like a much bigger issue.
My next issue is that sometimes it just hard-freezes. Zero warning, under no load, I can’t even move the mouse. Linux on the desktop
You may want to consider fixing the system cache value.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/25/39
I use lower values than Linus suggested.
I don’t see why that would cause lock ups? I’m pretty sure it’s just a driver bug. Didn’t used to do it but I upgraded the kernel recently and then it started.
Interesting thread anyway - do you know if they ever fixed the defaults?
I added a userland OOM and now my browsers or slack dissapears and I’m confused for 5-10 secunds every time. sometimes my editor or one of the lsp servers.
cspell also leaks like crazy
Oh how do I do this? Can you choose what processes it kills first even if they’re not the worst offenders?
look into early oom
My experience is that without swap my system will eventually lock up, without a clear sign of why. This was especially true when disabling memory overcommit, but I blame applications for that one.
Who knows maybe my ram is failing.
