Score:1

Is large swap appropriate for infrequent, high memory task?

it flag

Hypothetical: I have a workstation with 32 GB RAM which is perfectly fine for most tasks. However, I rarely (1-2 times/year) need to perform a task that is very, very memory intensive (i.e. 150 GB Memory needed). Its fine for this to take a long time since its infrequent. Would it be appropriate to buy a 1TB SSD and dedicate it to Swap instead of upgrading to 256 GB RAM given the price difference? Would this even work?

For a bit more information, the large task involves large scale genomic data and most of the memory is taken in the form of very large hash tables, if I understand the software correctly.

heynnema avatar
ru flag
Edit your question and show me `free -h` and `swapon -s` and `sysctl vm.swappiness`.
Austin D avatar
it flag
@heynnema, This is not a real machine. Purely a hypothetical question to better understand the interaction between Swap and RAM
heynnema avatar
ru flag
Then no, it would not be appropriate to have a 1TB SSD be swap in this hypo example.
Austin D avatar
it flag
@heynnema, could you explain why so I can better understand? What would you expect to go wrong in this system?
heynnema avatar
ru flag
It would be more appropriate to try tuning the system, starting with an appropriate /swapfile and adjusting vm.swappiness, for a start. Prefer not to use SSD for a swap. But since this is hypo, it's kind of moot, isn't it?
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