What do you prefer:
( ) a 1% chance the system would crawl to a halt but would work
( ) a 1% change the kernel would die and nothing would work
( ) a 1% chance the system would crawl to a halt but would work
( ) a 1% change the kernel would die and nothing would work
Eg Google used to (and perhaps still does?) run their servers without swap, because they had built fault tolerance in their fleet anyway, so were happier to deal with the occasional crash than with the occasional slowdown.
For your desktop at home, you'd probably rather deal with a slowdown that gives you a chance to close a few programs, then just crashing your system. After all, if you are standing physically in front of your computer, you can always just manually hit the reset button, if the slowdown is too agonising.
If your problem doesn't keep growing, and you just have more data that programs want to keep in memory than you have RAM, but the actual working set of what's accessed frequently still fits in RAM, then swap perfectly solves this.
Think lots of programs open in the background, or lots of open tabs in your browser, but you only ever rapidly switch between at most a handful at a time. Or you are starting a memory hungry game and you don't want to be bothered with closing all the existing memory hungry programs that idle in the background while you play.
> Doesn't swap just delay the fundamental issue?
The fundamental issue here is what the linux fanboys literally think what killing a working process and most of the time the process[0] is a good solution for not solving the fundamental problem of memory allocation in the Linux kernel.
Availability of swap allows you to avoid malloc failure in a rare case your processes request more memory than physically (or 'physically', heh) present in the system. But in the mind of so called linux administrators even if a one byte of the swap would be used then the system would immediately crawl to a stop and never would recover itself. Why it always should be the worst and the most idiotic scenario instead of a sane 'needed 100MB more, got it - while some shit in the memory which wasn't accessed since the boot was swapped out - did the things it needed to do and freed that 100MB' is never explained by them.
[0] imagine a dedicated machine for *SQL server - which process would have the most memory usage on that system?
Also: When those processes that haven't been active since boot (and which may never be active again) are swapped out, more system RAM can become available for disk caching to help performance of things that are actively being used.
And that's... that's actually putting RAM to good use, instead of letting it sit idle. That's good.
(As many are always quick to point out: Swap can't fix a perpetual memory leak. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that it could.)
And maybe plan on getting more RAM.
(It's your system. You're allowed to tune it to fit your usage.)
What if I've got 64G of ram and 64G of swap and need the same amount of memory?
And no, if you need 100MB more then it's literally not important how much RAM do you have. You just needed 100MB more this time.
Adding a couple of gb of swap means the image resizing is _slow_, but completes without causing issues.
Detecting things are down is far easier than detecting things are slow.
I'd rather that oom started killing things though than a kernel panic or a slow system. Ideally the thing that is leaking, but if not the process using the most memory (and yes I know that "using" is tricky)
So most of the time I'd prefer option 3: the OOM killer to reap a few offending programs and let me handle restarting them.