running Mint with no swap partition

[hercules.pwaro]

Sorry if this topic has come up before, but when I did a search of old posts I didn't find it.

After reading up on the differences between today's RAM and the RAM of yesteryear, I decided to try installing Mint with no swap partition. It hasn't been very long but there have been no problems with Mint since that installation, and certain things are actually better this way, especially the speed of copying data to and from flash drives. But I'd still like to know whether people think I made a mistake, or if it's something other than Linux if it doesn't have a swap. Please let me know.

[xenopeek]

Welcome to the Linux Mint forums.

It's fine to install without swap. I've done so for years. Only mind that you need swap in order to be able to hibernate (suspend to disk) your computer. If that's not a requirement, and you have enough RAM installed for the tasks you run, fine.

[Cosmo.]

Without knowing the amount of RAM, this cannot be answered.

Even with plenty of RAM if depends from you can - depending from the usage of the computer - get into the situation, where the system needs to swap. If there is no swap at all, the system will simply stall. Just 1 or days ago there was a a user here, who has reported, that the vast majority of his 8 GB RAM has been used. This is a situation, where swap may get important, that the system does not suddenly halt (irrecoverably).

[austin.texas]

I have 8GB of ram, and I actually used most of my 9.25GB swap one time under unusual circumstances. I opened a large number of very large photos in tabs in my browser. That is the only time I have noticed swap being used at all.

[hercules.pwaro]

Thank you to everyone for answering.

Without knowing the amount of RAM, this cannot be answered.

Even with plenty of RAM if depends from you can - depending from the usage of the computer - get into the situation, where the system needs to swap. If there is no swap at all, the system will simply stall. Just 1 or days ago there was a a user here, who has reported, that the vast majority of his 8 GB RAM has been used. This is a situation, where swap may get important, that the system does not suddenly halt (irrecoverably).

I have 4 GB of RAM and a 1 GB graphics card (it's a system from about 2012). The most RAM I've ever seen myself use in several Linux distributions is about 2 GB. I'm not a gamer and don't do video rendering, and I'm not sure what else needs more than 4 GB of RAM.

The difference when transferring data to and from USB memory sticks is remarkable. In the past Linux would sometimes ruin my memory sticks by doing incomplete writes. In Mint the writing of data to the memory stick would pause unaccountably for up to 10 minutes at a time and then resume, and at the very end it would pause for up to 15 minutes. When unmounting the memory stick I'd get a message to wait because data was being written to it. But now that I have no swap file, the writing occurs in choppy chunks and is rapid and complete very quickly. The reading is much the same.

[Cosmo.]

It would have been interesting to watch "in the past", if at that time swap had been used at all. Also reducing the swappiness would have been interesting to watch. It could have been a solution without the risk I wrote about.

[hercules.pwaro]

It would have been interesting to watch "in the past", if at that time swap had been used at all. Also reducing the swappiness would have been interesting to watch. It could have been a solution without the risk I wrote about.

Well, I can always do some testing with a junk memory stick by installing Mint with a swap file and then doing large-scale copying...but I don't know how to do the data collection and analysis. Is there a standard approach?

As for altering the swappiness values, I tried that and it seemed to screw up my GUI terminal (although not my tty1-6 consoles). Maybe I screwed something up when adjusting the swappiness values as well.

Please provide whatever guidance you can.

[uberdorf]

Sometimes I don't use the swap partition when installing Mint on a dual boot computer which I had to manually adjust the partitions. That is only because of laziness on my part. I haven't run into any problems due to no swap yet that I'm aware of, but maybe it has happened. I often use the suspend option too.

Come to think of it, I don't use Cinnamon because of suspend issues. Maybe that is the cause, maybe not. XFCE and Mate both work fine for me with suspend and no swap partition.

[Crewp]

It would have been interesting to watch "in the past", if at that time swap had been used at all. Also reducing the swappiness would have been interesting to watch. It could have been a solution without the risk I wrote about.

Well, I can always do some testing with a junk memory stick by installing Mint with a swap file and then doing large-scale copying...but I don't know how to do the data collection and analysis. Is there a standard approach?

As for altering the swappiness values, I tried that and it seemed to screw up my GUI terminal (although not my tty1-6 consoles). Maybe I screwed something up when adjusting the swappiness values as well.

Please provide whatever guidance you can.

One of our forum members Pjotr has a website that give very good instructions on changing the swappiness. https://sites.google.com/site/easylinux ... /firstmint