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justsomehnguy 3 days ago

Uhm, no.

Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.

Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.

SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Swap isn’t unlimited, it just delays the inevitable and makes everything slow while doing it. A 4GB swap partition isn’t going to save you if you run your 32GB computer out of memory.

justsomehnguy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Who the hell would set 4Gb swap for a 32Gb RAM machine in 2025?

A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?

> and makes everything slow while doing it

It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.

And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.

baq 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It does help. It gives time for the kernel in this situation and also helps in general by allowing to defragment memory. You want to keep a small amount of swap space at all times.

beeflet 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless it's some sort of autonomous safety-related process, It's usually better for the process to die so I can just restart it.

Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.