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0 pointsCapriciousCptl5y ago0 comments

Same experience here. My Ubuntu laptop accidentally doubled-down on 16gb RAM because I forgot to give it a swap partition (whoops). It hangs maybe once a month under a VS Code, PostgreSQL, FastAPI/Python, React workload. Basically, not annoyingly frequently enough for a lazy person like me to change the partition table. The same workload on my 7 year old Ubuntu desktop with a swap partition on a fast SSD very rarely ever hangs.

Certainly some devs need more than 16gb, but they know who they are. And you know who they are because, well, they love telling you :).

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3 comments · 3 top-level

CraigJPerry5y ago

You could create a swap file rather than a dedicated partition:

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=8192
    $ mkswap /swap
    $ swapon /swap
    $ echo "/swap swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

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laurencerowe5y ago

You don’t need to reparation, just configure it to use a swap file. If you set swappiness to zero it will only use it when out of ram.

barkingcat5y ago

you can always add a swap file ... that makes your life easier so you don't have hangs, and you don't need to repartition.

I use swap files all the time with things like raspberry pi's and such because I don't want to mess with the sd card partitions, but still from time to time it's good to have that swap fallback since the memory onboard is limited.

Swap files are super easy to set up, take up no "brainpower" and disk space is cheap these days.

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