Hi guys!
I have what I’d consider a beefy gaming PC. AMD 7700 CPU, 32GB RAM, 7800XT 16GB, NVMe 1TB for OS, mSATA SSD 2TB for storage/games.
So…whenever I get a while using the computer, with a bunch of windows open, say firefox taking 4GB of RAM, total for everything a bit over 16GB…I’m prone to get a whole system slowdown/freeze, which can take a few full minutes until it settles. I can see the storage red led on the whole time without blinking, so it really looks like swapping.
However sometimes I don’t see movements in the system process viewer, in usage from RAM/swap, I’d imagine those graphs would change if the data in swap has changed.
Swapping is set in the mSATA, taking 8GB, so I reckon that migth not be the fastest. Still, that’s an SSD. I’m not sure how can I check/troubleshoot whatever is tanking my computer performance?
On laptops, you normally want at least as much swap space as you do physical memory, as when you hibernate the thing, that’s where the hibernation data is stored, and if you don’t have enough space there, hibernation will fail. IIRC, it’s also required for some kernel debugging technique (where, as hazy memory indicates, I believe the kernel can basically “dump core” to swap space, then reboot and write it out to regular storage). So it certainly works, because there are a lot of Linux systems out there that use that much relative to physical memory. Though I admit that I’ve never tried using a swap file instead of a swap partition, myself.
It’s not quite like the old days, with rotational drives, and pre-OOM killer, where having a huge amount of swap would let the system bog down to the point where it couldn’t be used.
Do you need 32GB swap? Probably not, if you don’t plan to hibernate the system. But unless you need the storage for something else, probably doesn’t hurt. And if you’ve got a 1TB system drive, I doubt that you’re short on space.
I have 128GB of main memory and 128GB of swap on this system. Same 1:1 ratio, and I normally use that on Linux systems.
For the example, I just chose an arbitrary, “reasonable” size. Feel free to pick a size that you feel is better, if you’d prefer something else.