Hensyr Wolf wrote:So the conclusion may be that a swap partition is desirable when installing Zorin OS 15 Core even though a swap file is created.
Thank you MBMz10 for installing and trying out the swap options
Firstly, you are welcome. You asked a great question and got a nice debate going. It was a good learning experience.
Seeing how the machine degraded as it was running out of RAM and using ever more swap was enlightening.
Note that NO swapfile was created (Zorin 15) on the install I made a swap-area / partition, only when doing a 'default' (not manually setting a swap partition) install did it create a swapfile but no swap-area / partition. I only did the Zorin 12.4 test to see if it would prompt about swap if I manually partitioned and 'forgot' about swap, which it did. Zorin 15 will just create the swapfile unless you create a swap-area / partition.
I would conclude that if a swap partition is desired, because you know about such things, you can do it. If not, Zorin does it own thing and it just works anyway.
Love that Linux is all about choice and options
Below explains why this thread sparked my curiosity, read at your own risk!
My old machine has 4 GB RAM, most distro's (Mint Zorin etc) would create a 4 GB Swap Partition when I installed them. Some people say your swap should be double your RAM, on the 64 GB SSD I was using, that was a considerable amount of lost storage, especially when seeing the RAM usage rarely went much over 1 GB for what I was generally doing, hardly ever hitting 2 GB RAM and somewhere around then it would start using the swap, sometimes only KB or MB into swap.
I discovered you can change the 'swappiness' value, the threshold at which swap begins to be utilised, to make it use RAM rather than swap, I paid for the RAM so want to use it.
This was even more apparent when my new machine had 16 GB RAM, hardly used 2 GB of that, but was writing to swap, why buy all that RAM?
As I started to change over to SSD's from HDD it was similar, with SSD's, you should 'over provision' or leave a portion unformmated, the more the better, to enable it to 'share the ware' and not constantly be writing to the same cells (area) as they have a limited amount or write cycles, don't quote me on any of this its a layman’s generalisation.
It was enough to make my head hurt. So I just use them as I see fit and apparently the newer SSD's do much of this themselves. I have some SSD's that must be about 5 years old and used everyday that are still going strong, one even has a 10 year warranty.
My point is everyone has an opinion on such matters, Distro makers configure their product to suit their 'target' users, component manufactures the same. I want to use the RAM I bought, even if it is just to make me feel good, so I change the swappiness and I throw SSD's into machines and just use them, if they start to fail after 2 or 3 years maybe I change my stance, 5 years, well I've had HDD's fail in 5 years.
My 2 machines that have default installs (one has 2 GB RAM one has 4 GB RAM) and I suspend often, just work, they write to swap often and sometimes have hundred's of MB in swap.
My 16 GB RAM machine has the swappiness changed and a 4 GB swap partition (default install) on a 128 GB SSD, I'm on it right now, its using 1.7 GB RAM and no swap, I am about to start a VM ( I give them 8 GB RAM because I can) and watch the RAM usage go up to around 10-12 GB with no swap usage and do I feel good about that....
Zorin have a product that will 'just work' out of the box, they don't mention the swap in their install instructions as it is taken care of automatically. Perfect for a new Linux user to get up and running. Unless you have a particular need to change the default install, such as me with my swappiness vanity hangup thing, you will be just fine.
