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When installing a new OS recently, I struggled to find a definitive view on what to do with swap. There's no data about it, just superstition, and the thread about this yesterday was full of people saying nobody uses it.

Maybe I can invoke Cunningham's law? I use 16GB on an NVMe SSD, which is equal to the size of my RAM.

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I've been told that 90s-era manuals for SAP systems recommended swap size = 2x RAM size. There's a story circulating in the office that someone remembered this rule in 2012-ish when setting up a bunch of fresh systems with 2 TB RAM each, causing the storage support team to wonder why the fresh filer was already full after just a few days.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TheLegendOfSwa...

tl;dr - 2x RAM was true in the early 90s

Here is a really good article breaking down what happens in linux with regard to swap, albeit a bit dated (2011) https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10678

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