Ted Pomeroy writes:
I have heard that the SSD has a limited, if large, number of re-writes in its lifetime. Like a usb thumbdrive it can wear out. So, if a computer is heavily used would it make sense to add 'noswap' to the Grub default file? This would eliminate the many re-writes to swap and preserve the SSD for a longer life. Is this reasonable?
Do you actually use swap very often? For the last five years I've regularly used a netbook with 2G RAM, and I saw it obviously swapping maybe a dozen times during those years; usually when I did something silly like load a bunch of big images into GIMP without closing most of my firefox tabs first. The computer would slow to a crawl. I always saw swapping as an emergency measure: "You messed up and loaded something way too big, so the computer will now let you, SLOWLY, save your work and quit gracefully instead of crashing." I certainly wouldn't want to work on a swapping computer on a regular basis. Either learn different habits (fewer firefox tabs, quit firefox before starting LibreOffice, only load 3 camera images into GIMP at a time instead of 10, whatever it takes), or get more RAM. Given that, having a swap partition available and swapping enabled doesn't hurt anything: most of the time it doesn't get used but it's a nice emergency backup if you mess up. A more relevant question is /tmp, which does get regularly used. Lots of people recommend putting /tmp on a tmpfs instead of on the disk. On a spinning disk, that speeds things up marginally and avoids seeks; on an SSD, it reduces the writes to the SSD. I haven't actually converted my /tmp to tmpfs and I don't think it makes a huge difference either way, but there are reasaonable arguments for doing so. ...Akkana