but flash endurance isn't a strong argument here. you probably have O(TB) of flash, and aren't going to produce PB of swap writes any time soon. if you do a lot of swapping to a small flash device, it'll happen sooner.
I'm typing from a quite old 4GB laptop, which swaps heavily to a 250G SATA ssd. sure, it's not great, but it also costs zero. currently 9GB of swap is used, and it's not really noticeable. if I open 20 more tabs, it can introduce pauses.
google says this drive was released in 2014, and SMART says POH is about 10 years.
SMART also says wear leveling count is 665 and total written is 165327189538 LBAs (78834 GiB, or 338 drive-writes). I'm not expecting it to die soon, though using a 4G laptop is a bit of a stunt these days...
the point is that a system that has sustained heavy swapping for years has not generates so many writes to worry much. a modern system with 10x speed and 10x capacity (and probably less RAM deficit) would have even less effect. even for QDR with it's few-hundred cycle endurance spec...
I guess you haven’t tried AMD’s composable kernel on Gentoo, or qtwebkit. I have a special env for the former called half-the-threads because it eats 2.5GB per thread. I removed the latter as soon as I was able to. I even add 32GB (half my RAM) of ZRAM for CK, and the Gentoo ebuild has a check for enough RAM per thread that stops the build if unmet, it wasn’t there before and I’ve had my system lock up because of OOM which OOMD wasn’t quick enough to catch.
All of this is to say that, it does have a potential impact on flash, if you rebuild often, which tends to happen on Gentoo.
flash is a consumable, yes.
but flash endurance isn't a strong argument here. you probably have O(TB) of flash, and aren't going to produce PB of swap writes any time soon. if you do a lot of swapping to a small flash device, it'll happen sooner.
I'm typing from a quite old 4GB laptop, which swaps heavily to a 250G SATA ssd. sure, it's not great, but it also costs zero. currently 9GB of swap is used, and it's not really noticeable. if I open 20 more tabs, it can introduce pauses.
google says this drive was released in 2014, and SMART says POH is about 10 years.
SMART also says wear leveling count is 665 and total written is 165327189538 LBAs (78834 GiB, or 338 drive-writes). I'm not expecting it to die soon, though using a 4G laptop is a bit of a stunt these days...
the point is that a system that has sustained heavy swapping for years has not generates so many writes to worry much. a modern system with 10x speed and 10x capacity (and probably less RAM deficit) would have even less effect. even for QDR with it's few-hundred cycle endurance spec...
I guess you haven’t tried AMD’s composable kernel on Gentoo, or qtwebkit. I have a special env for the former called half-the-threads because it eats 2.5GB per thread. I removed the latter as soon as I was able to. I even add 32GB (half my RAM) of ZRAM for CK, and the Gentoo ebuild has a check for enough RAM per thread that stops the build if unmet, it wasn’t there before and I’ve had my system lock up because of OOM which OOMD wasn’t quick enough to catch.
All of this is to say that, it does have a potential impact on flash, if you rebuild often, which tends to happen on Gentoo.
This was a consideration when I wrote this