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Did we kill Linux's killer feature?
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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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And I would die of old age waiting for the compile to finish.
Swap is not "disk RAM". It's used for storing pages that go unused for extended periods of time. It's an optimization system designed to be used during normal system operations.
Technically it could solve some mild out-of-memory situations if given enough time but in practice the disk access is so slow compared to RAM that for all intents and purposes your system appears to freeze so you get bored eventually and reboot it. An attempt to compile a large application under these circumstances would last a very long time indeed.
If anything, you should disable swap in such a situation. Without swap the compile process would crash instantly when growing out of memory, with swap your system freezes.
Swap space is also used for storing a compressed dump of RAM during hybernation but that's a special case.
There are lots of options. You can also setup a swap file in memory that uses compression. Since swap tends to compress really well, you can allocate more memory than you have RAM and still not use slower swap on a HDD or SSD.
Yeah, I know how swap works. I'm lazy and it would accomplish the task if needed, I've done it many times before in similar situations especially on low RAM Gentoo machines.
Agreed, it's slow as fuck. It also gets the job done without going outside the package manager.