> Swap is still mostly mysterious to me ... I remember back in the windows xp days
I mean no disrespect, but why in 20 years haven't you just read up on or watched a video explaining swap and disk cache?
I mean no disrespect, but why in 20 years haven't you just read up on or watched a video explaining swap and disk cache?
Because that swapping would occur regardless, there would be a performance penalty when you didn't actually need it. Pointing the swap back to ram circumvented that.
I wouldn't say it's a crutch as there are still plenty of users machines and situations where ram might run out, so swapping is better than the apps crashing. But yes it's becoming increasingly obsolete.