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Would increasing my swap partition's size benefit my computer's performance?

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 4163 / 1 Year ago, wed, february 8, 2023, 1:19:00

Apparently increasing the size of the swap should make my computer able to handle more applications because it can "push more data aside" into the swap.

...or will it make the computer hang more because it's putting everything in swap? So this means that it shouldn't be too big or too small?

In short; which is correct?;

The bigger the swap the better.

Swap should be balanced according to "something (?)".

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hergy

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4 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago ongdiligenc · Accepted Answer

Not really. The only thing (memorywise) that improves performance is more RAM.

Remember that the slowest part of memory is your Hard-disk - swap just provides the ability to use more memory by swapping some pages out to the disk, which is slow compared to RAM operations.

What you gain by providing more swap-space is the ability to run more/bigger programs, respectively programs with bigger memory requirements - at the cost of slowing the whole operation down.

As to the question of balancing: regard swap as last measure, used when everything else fails and the kernel would have to resort to killing a process because there no more memory available (OOM=Out of Memory). So keeping some swap is good.

An additional factor comes into play when you are using suspend to RAM (aka hibernating) - in that case you should provide the same amount that you have as RAM and maybe a little bit extra.