Recommended Swap for SSDs (nvme)

Nacho_Trebuchet

I read in another post that Solus out of the box is configured to support SSDs as is? Before I found Solus, I used Ubuntu/Mint and configured fstab with noatime and used cron.daily. I need to verify my Solus install is good to go but it sounds like it should be.

What about using swap-space? Is it better to not create a swap partition and use a swap-file instead when installed on SSDs. Reducing swappiness is one thing to do, but what about using file over space. I have read conflicting opinions on what should be best practice. For context, I have a desktop machine with 16GB of RAM and do not hibernate or suspend. My machine is either running or off.

dbarron

Unless you use heavy workloads, you probably won't need swap. And there is really no difference for you (on or off, no hibernate) whether you use swap files or partition.
Also, I've seen cautions that swap on SSDs is not a good thing, (ie wearing ssd out).

kyrios

Solus sets the swappiness to 10 by default (where some other distro leave the value at 60 which is way too much for a standard desktop usage).
If you don't use a swap partition or if it's too small, you won't be able to use hibernate (suspend to disk).

Personally I set the swappiness to 1 and I set a 1Gb swap file on a machine that has 16Gb of RAM. There is no universal rule, it depends on the tastes, usages, amount of memory, etc..