Swap can be used by the system even if the RAM is not completley used up.
This can be disabled by changing swappiness to 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness
Thanks to everyone for your comments!
For starters, I will test my system with swapiness = 0 and the top command so
I can see if the partition is actually needed. On top of that, I will use
swapoff -a from time to time and observe how the system is working with this
option.
Concerning
Hibernation is not suspend-to-ram. The contents of RAM is written to a swap
partition when hibernating.
RAM needs power, or it looses data.
When a computer is hibernating it is possible to disconnect power (or remove
battery) or even boot another operating system (which must not use the swap
Ok, then I confused the terms.
I only need suspend-to-ram, not suspend-to-disk or something similar.
I have a Notebook with 4G ram and I heard very often that the swap partition
is pretty useless. If you don't agree with this (I haven't any reference and
maybe I heard false claims) then please explain why.
Anyway, the actual reason for thinking about it is my plan to create an
encrypted
if you use hibernate, you need swap (equal to RAM)... if not, go ahead - i
still don't think it's a good idea. Just remove/comment the entry in fstab,
then you might want to restart, to verify everything is working and that
free shows no swap.
Not sure the take away of having no swap, but I found this option on a DDG
search: https://www.antagonism.org/privacy/encrypted-swap-linux.shtml
You can use swapoff (possibly with argument -a) command to stop using swap
temporarily. If you remove the swap line from fstab and restart your machine,
I believe you can safely remove the partition.
Your system might respond faster after removing the swap partition (this
comes from
Other than for hibernation, swap space is kicked in when your RAM gets used
up.
You'll be fine as long as you don't do anything that causes your 4 GB of RAM
to fill up, like graphics or video editing or genomic sequence analysis.
