To be clear, I don’t blame the poster of this comment at all for the content of their post – this is accepted as “common knowledge” by a lot of Linux sysadmins and is probably one of the most likely things that you will hear from one if you ask them to talk about swap. It is unfortunately also, however, a misunderstanding of the purpose and use of swap, especially on modern systems.

  • lurch (he/him)
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    6 months ago

    oh, i see. i have never done anything like your example. i have converted lots of videos, but not where it would go back in the file. yeah, i can see how you would want to slow down everything else on the system by swapping it, to get your video processed a bit faster. it’s just nothing i would do. however, if i wanted to, i could just truncate a file of 6GB, add it as swap and delete it afterwards.