[Mashiro]

Swap is not RAM! Swap is using disk space to create virtual memory that is used when you run out of real memory. Nothing more than that. It helps to fight low RAM but because HDDs and even most SSDs are slower than real RAM the performance of your system will take a hit when Swap is used in a extended period of time and amount. The CPU usage will spike up to high values because the CPU has to wait for the slow HDD/SSD to process the data in this virtual memory.

When a multitasking operating system runs out of physical memory, it is unable to start new processes or allocate more memory to existing processes. To solve this problem, a special block of space on the local storage (often the hard drive) is set aside to act as a temporary holding area for processes that aren’t currently running. The OS “swaps” the inactive process out of memory and on to the hard disk. This frees up memory for new work. When the inactive process becomes active again, it will be swapped back from the local storage to the memory. This procedure is known as swapping.

And generally Swap on SSDs is a bad idea as it will shorten the lifetime of a SSD.


A guide for Debian 8: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/t...n-debian-8