28 Feb
2025
28 Feb
'25
5:09 p.m.
I've read several bits of guidance lately
suggesting avoiding swap
due to the increasing prevalence of solid-state memories. The
assertion is that I/O heavy swapping, especially if you get into a
thrashing state, is liable to age current storage technologies much
more than it would have in the platter disk era.
I was told a few years ago by a smart person I respect that one of the
reasons Mac laptops were still so poorly endowed with RAM (iirc 8 GB
max) was because Apple was shipping SSD in them, so the performance hit
wasn't really noticeable. One hopes those were sturdy (DWPD) SSDs, but
barring the marketing decisions (removing ports people want), Apple's
hardware engineering is usually decent.
De