this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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I use Arch btw


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this is right after closing qemu-kvm

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Using swap isn't always a sign you need more RAM. Typically, if you use a computer for a while or have a lot of IO operations going on, Linux will decide to swap some things to make more room for cache.

Sometimes Linux just finds that you have a bunch of inactive app memory and it can swap that out to cache way more stuff. That's just good memory management, but it's not worth buying more RAM over

[–] ricecake 6 points 4 months ago

That's totally fair. Most of my "caring about swap" time is when I was managing servers, and so you wouldn't have inactive apps to get swapped out, thus swap usage was a sign that you needed to get a new server and put down the old one.

Turns out I don't monitor my home computer the way I monitor the work ones. :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

This. Also most of what you read online about swap is just plain wrong. Tons of people will tell you to reduce swappiness to 1 or just to not use swap at all. It's crazy how many people have no idea about how it actually works. I do include myself here. I just use a large zram disk so systemd-oom won't get tripped when 3d rendering. That's all I need to know.