Question about swap file vs swap partition. I have a dozen spinny disks with too many ancient distros on too many machines.
I am slowly consolidating to a few Debian 12 Bookworm machines with Samsung terabyte SSDs. When large-RAM low-power fast motherboards become cheap enough, I will migrate to those. More RAM may imply larger swap areas (a semi-religious debate I hope to avoid). I want to be ready if the "large swap" zealots win the debate and design software dependent on swap. SSD swap seems MUCH better than spinny-disk swap, very fast access compared to moving a spinny disk head across a platter ... though way slower than RAM. ---- Large SSD swap also facilitates fast hibernate, though Debian startup and shutdown are amazingly fast using an SSD (10 seconds startup/login, 2 second shutdown). Perhaps I don't need hibernate-to-swap. ---- One of my recent SSD experiments resulted in a too-small swap partition. Inept resizing attempts borked the file system. But ... I can also create a huge swap file on a regular ext4 file system, and easily up-size the swap file when I install more RAM. Resizing a partition is more complex. I've read some online debates about swap partitions vs. swap files. Most of the debates are from the spinny disk era; the speed tradeoffs have changed radically. My main concern is reliability, software compatibility, and ease of maintenance rather than maximum speed. ---- I suspect I will need SOME separate-partition swap, but I hope I can get by with a few gigabytes, relying mostly on a big swap file, growing that swap file over time as I migrate to motherboards and laptops with more RAM. At 69.9 years of age, I should also minimize complexity, deploying systems that I can maintain with an 80 or 90 y.o. brain someday. My father-in-law is 105, and his Windoze computer took many days to decrapify. I won't have a son-in-law to do that for me. So, that's a lot of yammering, another sequela of excess age. In summary: "Optimum SSD swap? ?? ???" Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
