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Eadwine Rose wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2025 1:36 am
"and forget about it until it becomes a problem" <-- to me that IS a problem, 'cause I would not sit easy with that. But YMMV of course.
That swap partition is easiest, and if it is big enough (I have 8gb, I don't use hybernate or stuff like that, all is fine) it will never become a problem.
My harddrive is 500Gb, before that had 250gb. My partitions are like so:
500mb efi
80gb root (40 on the 250 drive)
8Gb swap
the rest is home
Standard user here, nothing fancy, been using this install for quite a while now. 1mb in use on the efi, 26gb used on root, nothing on swap that I have ever seen, and the home has about 1/3rd in use.
Just my 2 cts.
The setup I have in mind is about that.
But I put /home on 500GB HDD.
All the other partitions on 120GB SSD including 8GB swap.
One drive for system and one for home is a sensible choice for safety. Also now you can get 1TB SSDs for a reasonable price.
If you are swapping on so regularly it is affecting your performance as to need it to be on an SSD, you could either get more RAM or have a look at the swappiness setting:
The gods of Linux documentation wrote:This control is used to define the rough relative IO cost of swapping and filesystem paging, as a value between 0 and 200. At 100, the VM assumes equal IO cost and will thus apply memory pressure to the page cache and swap-backed pages equally; lower values signify more expensive swap IO, higher values indicates cheaper.
Keep in mind that filesystem IO patterns under memory pressure tend to be more efficient than swap's random IO. An optimal value will require experimentation and will also be workload-dependent.
The default value is 60.
For in-memory swap, like zram or zswap, as well as hybrid setups that have swap on faster devices than the filesystem, values beyond 100 can be considered. For example, if the random IO against the swap device is on average 2x faster than IO from the filesystem, swappiness should be 133 (x + 2x = 200, 2x = 133.33).
At 0, the kernel will not initiate swap until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less than the high watermark in a zone.
To make it permanent, add the line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
AK-47 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2025 5:37 pm
One drive for system and one for home is a sensible choice for safety. Also now you can get 1TB SSDs for a reasonable price.
If you are swapping on so regularly it is affecting your performance as to need it to be on an SSD, you could either get more RAM or have a look at the swappiness setting:
The gods of Linux documentation wrote:This control is used to define the rough relative IO cost of swapping and filesystem paging, as a value between 0 and 200. At 100, the VM assumes equal IO cost and will thus apply memory pressure to the page cache and swap-backed pages equally; lower values signify more expensive swap IO, higher values indicates cheaper.
Keep in mind that filesystem IO patterns under memory pressure tend to be more efficient than swap's random IO. An optimal value will require experimentation and will also be workload-dependent.
The default value is 60.
For in-memory swap, like zram or zswap, as well as hybrid setups that have swap on faster devices than the filesystem, values beyond 100 can be considered. For example, if the random IO against the swap device is on average 2x faster than IO from the filesystem, swappiness should be 133 (x + 2x = 200, 2x = 133.33).
At 0, the kernel will not initiate swap until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less than the high watermark in a zone.
To make it permanent, add the line to /etc/sysctl.conf:
I think my "swappines" is set to 10 on the other machines.
The RAM on my laptops is at max capacity.
Since these machines are old buying a larger SSD is out of the question since for 4 out of my 5 laptops are pre 2015. A larger SSD is worth much more than the laptops.
That's why I bought the cheapest Kingston SSD...
@JesusLinux Let's see what you are working with here. Can you please run the Quick System Info utility on the machine you are trying to set up and post the QSI report to the forum.
another thought is, that I;ve usually set an Swap Partition . .
- to either 2Gb or to 4Gb in size -
and yet have Never seen any use-age above ~800 Gb in System Monitor.
Please use the check-mark icon to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.
AK-47 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2025 10:40 pm
@JesusLinux Let's see what you are working with here. Can you please run the Quick System Info utility on the machine you are trying to set up and post the QSI report to the forum.
I'm running this session live from a USB snapshot from other laptop. I want to use this installation snapshot.
I managed to upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 on this machine and it's fine so far. Slower compared to W10.
I want to dual boot W11 with MX Linux.
In case W11 goes crazy I delete it.
This snapshot is from a laptop with only one SSD. So /root and /home are in the same partition.
Pierre wrote: ↑Sat Feb 22, 2025 1:36 am
another thought is, that I;ve usually set an Swap Partition . .
- to either 2Gb or to 4Gb in size -
and yet have Never seen any use-age above ~800 Gb in System Monitor.
In an old laptop with only 3GB RAM I have 6 GB Swap partition.
On a laptop with 8GB RAM I have 8 GB Swap partition...
Both only have one SSD drive.
I can boot on both OSes however MX Linux is booting in init instead of systemd so I can't use sudo for upgrades and basic commands.
What is going on?
Here's the info:
jesuslinux@B-970:~
$ sudo apt update && apt upgrade && flatpak upgrade
[sudo] password for jesuslinux:
Reading package lists... Done
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock. It is held by process 3787 (apt-get)
N: Be aware that removing the lock file is not a solution and may break your system.
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
jesuslinux@B-970:~
$ sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && flatpak upgrade
Hit:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security InRelease
Hit:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease
Hit:4 https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable InRelease
Hit:5 https://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/mx-packages/mx/repo bookworm InRelease
Hit:6 http://repository.spotify.com stable InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
jesuslinux@B-970:~
$ ps -p 1 -o comm=
init
Consider doing a system update (should update the kernel) and then enabling zramswap using the MX Service Manager.
If you want, you can increase the maximum allowable usage to 50% by editing /etc/default/zramswap and setting PERCENT=50 (remove the '#' preceding it). This is a percentage of your RAM that can be stored on the swap (the uncompressed contents, not the compressed one).
