Modern systems have so much RAM that swap is never used in normal operation.
This means the swap comes into play most often when a runaway process uses up
all available memory. In this case, swap at best, gives a little bit more time
before that system becomes non-responsive and dies.
With an SSD around, I
would rather the system die quickly.
Also, a SSD is sensitive to power
failures during writes. This makes them very vulnerable to power failures when
the system is thrashing. The observed failure mode for one SSD was Windows
7 starting an update operation, then executing a suspend command (mid-update.)
The resulting failure took out the entire SSD, because the Sandforce compression
and mapping tables were corrupted.
With an SSD, avoid any usage mode that
starts with a burst of disk access, and then results in a power down while the
disk access is taking place. Turning off the page file prevents a burst of
write activity just before the system gets rebooted due to excessive thrashing
activity. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|