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No matter what I do, the SWAP usage remains zero all the time. Is there anything I am missing?
In the following case (see attached screenshot) I am running make on the kernel that I downloaded. The CPU usage is understandable. But what is the use of Swap when its never used.
Distribution: Cinnamon Mint 20.1 (Laptop) and 20.2 (Desktop)
Posts: 1,671
Rep:
Swap was usefull when you only had 128Mb of memory and were running applictaions which were greater in size either individually or when simultaneously loaded. With modern systems having 4Gb+ of memory, it's more difficult to "fill up" the main memory.
You can probably get away without any swap in these cases. Swap was also used for Core dumps but I'm not sure if that's still true.
No matter what I do, the SWAP usage remains zero all the time. Is there anything I am missing?
In the following case (see attached screenshot) I am running make on the kernel that I downloaded. The CPU usage is understandable. But what is the use of Swap when its never used.
Find a few JPEG's taken with a 12 Megapixel camera, and edit them
in the gimp ... that ought to get your machine swapping. Or keep
using it for a few days ... w/ an uptime of 3 hours, and not much
loaded there won't be much swapping going on.
Swap also gets used if you "hibernate" the computer. That's why they generally recommend having at least as much swap as ram. If you don't, you may not be able to use that option.
Otherwise, linux doesn't swap unless it needs to, so don't worry about it.
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