Skip to main content
added 9 characters in body
Source Link

To reiterate what others have said, moving swap to a straight RAM disk is rather pointless (in the most common case, see below). It achieves that at certain point, when the system is starved for free memory, some data is moved from RAM to RAM in a rather inefficient way.

Having swap on HDD/SSD achieves that the OS can clear out some completely unused RAM pages and peruseuse the freed space for e.g. file cache or other system buffers. You might not realize that the system allocates less of these RAM buffers because you have no available virtual memory without a page file; so in effect you might be stunting your performance by disabling swap.

However, a compressed RAM disk as swap drive, a "ZSWAP" drive, can be beneficial in edge cases (where you might need just an additionala few additional MB RAM to avoid swapping to HDD) by improving space efficiency of a segment of RAM to a certain extent.

To reiterate what others have said, moving swap to a straight RAM disk is rather pointless (in the most common case, see below). It achieves that at certain point, when the system is starved for free memory, some data is moved from RAM to RAM in a rather inefficient way.

Having swap on HDD/SSD achieves that the OS can clear out some completely unused RAM pages and peruse the for e.g. file cache or other system buffers. You might not realize that the system allocates less of these RAM buffers because you have no available virtual memory without a page file; so in effect you might be stunting your performance by disabling swap.

However, a compressed RAM disk as swap drive, a "ZSWAP" drive, can be beneficial in edge cases (where you might need just an additional few MB RAM to avoid swapping to HDD) by improving space efficiency of a segment of RAM to a certain extent.

To reiterate what others have said, moving swap to a straight RAM disk is rather pointless (in the most common case, see below). It achieves that at certain point, when the system is starved for free memory, some data is moved from RAM to RAM in a rather inefficient way.

Having swap on HDD/SSD achieves that the OS can clear out some completely unused RAM pages and use the freed space for e.g. file cache or other system buffers. You might not realize that the system allocates less of these RAM buffers because you have no available virtual memory without a page file; so in effect you might be stunting your performance by disabling swap.

However, a compressed RAM disk as swap drive, a "ZSWAP" drive, can be beneficial in edge cases (where you might need just a few additional MB RAM to avoid swapping to HDD) by improving space efficiency of a segment of RAM to a certain extent.

Source Link

To reiterate what others have said, moving swap to a straight RAM disk is rather pointless (in the most common case, see below). It achieves that at certain point, when the system is starved for free memory, some data is moved from RAM to RAM in a rather inefficient way.

Having swap on HDD/SSD achieves that the OS can clear out some completely unused RAM pages and peruse the for e.g. file cache or other system buffers. You might not realize that the system allocates less of these RAM buffers because you have no available virtual memory without a page file; so in effect you might be stunting your performance by disabling swap.

However, a compressed RAM disk as swap drive, a "ZSWAP" drive, can be beneficial in edge cases (where you might need just an additional few MB RAM to avoid swapping to HDD) by improving space efficiency of a segment of RAM to a certain extent.