Kiwi User  wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Jan 2018 02:26:24 +0000, bob prohaska wrote:
>
>> Dennis Lee Bieber  wrote:
>>>
>>>         If it is a matter of swap space, I'd recommend using a USB
>>>         powered
>>> hard-drive. The rewriting of heavy swap usage will rapidly wear out
>>> flash memory.
>>>
>>>
>> That seems to be less of an issue than feared. I've been using USB flash
>> swap on a Pi2 for the last two years, working much harder than a typical
>> desktop machine, though by no means 100% 24-7. So far, no problems at
>> all.
>> It may yet develop problems, but I'm starting to suspect obsolescence
>> will ends its usefulness first.
>>
> But does this workload swap much?  'top' shows whether swap is being used
> or, more drastically, turning swap off and seeing what happens will give
> a rather positive indication.
>
FreeBSD generally doesn't swap much, a few tens of megs active most of
the time. However, while recompiling the OS swap usage peaks around 1 GB,
which in my case happens a few times per week. That makes _having_ swap
mandatory, though it's little used.

On Raspbian, right now, Chromium is open with three tabs, one of which
is a live graphic animation, the swap line from top is
KiB Swap: 61374632 total,    31308 used, 61343324 free.   314760 cached Mem

With YouTube running a 720p video, the swap usage is slightly higher:
KiB Swap: 61374632 total,    42736 used, 61331896 free.   354428 cached Mem
and creeping up. A few minutes in it's up to
KiB Swap: 61374632 total,    62212 used, 61312420 free.   305156 cached Mem

Without a swap partition Chromium is essentially useless. With swap, the
browswer works quite decently.

bob prohaska

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