Does it actually work?

Posted Apr 10, 2025 14:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Does it actually work? by pizza
Parent article: Three ways to rework the swap subsystem

> If you have enough memory for your workload, nothing will ever get paged out.

Bingo! That means that swap is, essentially, a cheap replacement for an expensive extra RAM. And it has a theoretical, never achievable goal: be as fast as said extra RAM (it's not really possible to make it faster, I suspect).

> You're missing the point where "without swap" something in the system (possibly even what you're using) will be force-killed due to insufficient memory.

Not if you would buy extra RAM. Swap is, ultimately, a replacement for an extra RAM thus it's natural to compare it's speed to speed of a computer system with said extra RAM, isn't it?

After that you can look on list of workloads that you use, attach some $$ measure to the time that you are losing and then decide whether purchase of an extra RAM is worth it.

What other “swap speed” may you want to talk about and why? What would you do with these numbers and why?