tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.

To be clear, I don’t blame the poster of this comment at all for the content of their post – this is accepted as “common knowledge” by a lot of Linux sysadmins and is probably one of the most likely things that you will hear from one if you ask them to talk about swap. It is unfortunately also, however, a misunderstanding of the purpose and use of swap, especially on modern systems.

  • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Basically, sometimes extra filesystem cache in your physical RAM is so valuable that something else gets evicted to swap for it

    like say your web browser’s code for handling h264 video when you have no videos playing, unused memory like that can be moved to swap