You can of course monitor SMART wearout indicators to check whether this is happening. Casual use of swap for non LLM-use is actually fine since "cold" ephemeral data will be swapped out first and that will never get written to; KV cache is mostly fine since it's similarly append-only so writes are tolerably small; but yes, more general LLM inference totally breaks that limited-writes pattern and will wear out/kill your media.
> Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.
This.
Many people rediscovering what the purpose of swap files are, but will still find a way to abuse it without knowing that they are actually destroying their SSD.
And burn the swap pagesys file to a rewritable DVD to complete the cycle. It will be super fast that way.
Extend your RAM using RAM Doubler!
Then extend your disk space using DoubleSpace/DriveSpace!
I did that. It worked, until it didn't, and then I learned how to format my 340MB HDD and re-install DOS 6.22. Fun times!
Just to be sure install Stacker (from STAC electronics) too
If you are doing video models, this is an excellent way to murder your SSD.
Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.
You can of course monitor SMART wearout indicators to check whether this is happening. Casual use of swap for non LLM-use is actually fine since "cold" ephemeral data will be swapped out first and that will never get written to; KV cache is mostly fine since it's similarly append-only so writes are tolerably small; but yes, more general LLM inference totally breaks that limited-writes pattern and will wear out/kill your media.
I was writing it somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not as a serious suggestion. But thanks for adding the disclaimer, that's good advice!
zram swap otoh should be relatively 'free'
LLM working memory is not compressible so ZRAM doesn't buy you anything.
> Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.
This.
Many people rediscovering what the purpose of swap files are, but will still find a way to abuse it without knowing that they are actually destroying their SSD.
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