32GB RAM + 16GB Swap?

Question

I just upgraded my RAM in my Acer Aspire TC-885-ACCFLi5 from 16GB to 32GB. I have 2x1TB SSDs and 1x2TB HDD. I dual-boot between an Arch-based and a Debian-based distros. I use one of my SSDs for my /Roots, /Home, and /Swap. The other SSD and the HDD are used for storing large files as well as anything shared between my two distros like GIMP and Inkscape projects, backup directories, etc.

My previous SWAP partition is 16GB . Is there any reason to why I should not leave it alone and let my desktop use 32GB RAM + 16GB swap?

I have 2 primary partitions on my primary SSD: 1GB for /Boot, and 16GB for /Swap. The remainder is an extended partition divided into 2x36GB for both /Arch-Root and /Debian-Root. And finally the remaining amount of roughly 885GB-ish is for my /Home partition. (I realize those should all be lowercase, but I made them uppercase for readability.)

Any input into whether I should increase, decrease, or leave it alone would be great to learn. Thanks!

You likely never need to use swap. Just use zram instead. Leave the old swap partition as-is or remove it. See How do I use swap space for emergencies only? — phuclv, May 05 '20 at 01:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 04 '20 at 22:41

I dual-boot between an Arch-based and a Debian-based distros.

In that case, one suggestion I can pitch is to make your swap partition larger than your RAM capacity so that you can hibernate (AKA suspend-to-disk) one of those systems and boot into the other at the same time, no matter how much RAM is being consumed. Once you're done and return to the former, you'll resume back into the exact same state as when you left it.

My laptop has 8 GiB of RAM and a 12 GiB swap partition, and I occasionally dual boot between Manjaro Linux and Windows 7 this way.

AFAIK this is the easiest and most reliable way of getting suspend-to-disk to behave like this. It might be possible with a swap file, but I haven't tried it and your mileage may vary. Either way, make sure that you don't ever share the same swap partition, unless you're willing to troubleshoot problems arising from memory inconsistency. :-)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 04 '20 at 20:26

16GB of swap is fairly ridiculous these days, because the machine will have ground to a halt and become unusable long before you used up anywhere near 16GB of swap.

I generally run without swap on anything bigger than a rasp every pi on the grounds that I prefer a machine to OOM fast than to grind to a halt slowly.

If some swap is really needed, you might want to consider a zram device of about 50% of your RAM, which would typically compress down to half using zram. It'll be quicker even that swapping onto a fast SSD.

32GB RAM + 16GB Swap?

2 Answers2