Re: how to let systemd hibernate start/stop the swap area?

[Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey.

Just for better understanding:

AFAIU, the main idea of having swap despite enough memory was the
following:

Unless when processes explicitly release memory (or get stopped), the
kernel can mostly reclaim only cached memory,... but if swap is
available it can also reclaim anonymous memory.

So the idea is, that processes might have pages that are literally
never used (except for initial loading), yet still kept in memory... so
these permanently eat up physical memory when they cannot be swapped
out.

And the actual benefit that then comes (even when the memory is enough)
in is that (more) physical memory can be used for caching.

Right?
Or were there any other general ways by how this improves performance?


All this of course at the potential cost, that if one has some
misbehaving application, the system may still go into trashing.
Or is the kernel smart enough to prevent this?


thanks,
Chris.