Linux Swap – Do You Still Need It With Plenty of RAM?

[Unison]

Linux Swap – Do You Still Need It With Plenty of RAM?​

Something I've been wondering about with modern Linux systems is whether swap is still as important as it used to be.

Years ago, when PCs had much less RAM, having a swap partition or swap file seemed almost essential. But nowadays it's quite common to have 16GB, 32GB or even more RAM.

You can check what your Linux system is currently using with:

free -h

or:

swapon --show
There are also different approaches now, including:

• Traditional swap partitions
• Swap files
• zram
• No swap at all

Obviously swap can still be useful if the system runs low on physical memory, and hibernation can also depend on it.

But on a normal desktop PC with plenty of RAM, how much difference does it really make?

Do you still configure swap on your Linux systems, use something like zram, or have you stopped using swap altogether?