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Linux Swap Explained: Do You Need It?
(linuxiac.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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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!
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
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.
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 had this issue with System 76 with Ubuntu (for work). It was infuriating.