Hi, i have plenty of free ram, >5G, yet my sistem is using 40MB of swap space, i have an ancient 5400 rpm rotating hdd i don’t want my sistem touch hard disk at all if posible, i hate swap, I would like it to not even exist in the first place, i have swappiness already configured to recomended value (10).
Why my system insist in using hdd? please dont answer with links how linux kernel works, why it may in fact improve things, etc. bull************!!! i have read them almos all that result of google searches, i hate swap, i did not spent precious dollars buying memory that is not used at all by the ****ing os, is Tumbleweed kindly enough to force to vanish to nothing the use of swap memory? what ill effects can arise If i delete the swap entry in fstab?
Turn off all swap for the current boot:
swapoff -a
to see what happens without swap. You need not “delete” the swap line from fstab. Just add # at its start. Just try doing without to see what happens. There’s no need to speculate how it will affect you.
Please do not tell us only your conclusions, but post the facts. Only then can others check if your interpretation of the facts is correct.
You when you say “my sistem is using 40MB of swap space”, show why you think so.
yes, in quick tests i have tried swapoff and i did not notice any bad effects at all, but in the long term i am not sure, that is why i ask the community, may be someone has turned off swap completely for enough time to advice me. I says 40MB of swap beacuse is what gnome system monitor shows me.
In top output:
top - 03:48:39 up 33 min, 1 user, load average: 1.43, 3.13, 3.46
Tasks: 271 total, 2 running, 217 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 9.4 us, 2.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 84.6 id, 0.1 wa, 1.9 hi, 1.2 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 8007876 total, 2288532 free, 2070416 used, 3648928 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 8142844 total, 8069616 free, 73228 used. 5312972 avail Mem
Right now is not 40 but 73MB!!!
I would not bother, at the moment your swap use is 1.28% of total RAM used (used+cache): likely some space used by a stale process that was pushed to swap for whatever reason and never reclaimed back since.
I doubt that you will see any visible effect from that. Please be aware that the kernel is speedier in memory allocation computations if it “knows” to have some swap, even if not actually using it; so I would leave swap enabled.
If you really really hate it I think there are means for setting up a swap area in tmpfs, in RAM actually, but I never felt that need even with 5400 rpm disks.
There’s probably no need for concern.
On my system: With most normal activity, I see zero swap use.
If I download an iso, then I always see some swap use.
If I write an iso to a USB, then I always see some swap use.
If I run a KVM virtual machine, then I always see some swap use.
Those are about the only activities where I notice swap use.