Ask HN: Do older and savvy computer users prefer more RAM to avoid swapping?

1 point·amichail··5 comments

Maybe only older people have bad memories of extremely slow swapping on older computers?

As someone who started out on a machine with 3.5K free RAM, and a time (later that decade) when 2MB of RAM was ~$1000, you never really have too much. Swap is essentially disabled for me on my 16G machines (and up).

Modern disks are definitely faster, especially the SSDs. So the problem is less these days than before.

But it all still boils down to RAM being faster than disks overall, so the more RAM you can use, the less use you have to make of disks.

An analogy of RAM and swap, is that RAM is your workbench for cooking and swap is the cupboards in your kitchen. If you have enough workbench in the kitchen, you can leave all of your ingredients out all the time while you are making that dish. If you don't have enough workbench, you have to keep stopping and put some stuff away in the cupboard before you can grab some other stuff that's in the cupboard to put it on the workbench so that you can continue your job.

The old saying in the old days when hardware was extremely expensive (Not that RAM wasn't!) was "The quickest way to speed up a slow computer was throw as much RAM as you could afford at it." Same old workbench and cupboard idea.

I prefer having a medium amount of RAM, 32GB, because I mainly run Linux with xwindow and many years ago I generally found that it handled out-of-memory condition very poorly.

I do not like the whole of xwindows crapping out or applications being killed.

I don't really know if it is better than fifteen years ago and have little interest in finding out.

Also I sometimes have 9000 browser tabs open.

We remember when swapping was not even a thing.

Swapping heavily will murder performance even on a fast SSD.

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