System ground down to a halt

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2016-05-20 at 19:02 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 20 May 2016 at 18:51, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> > 13G swap is _really_ asking for trouble.
> 
> Why?  There is no harm in having too much.

Tell that to my system which used to take 5 minutes to wake up every
morning, because overnight it ran mlocate or similar which caused the
kernel to push out all my idle programs' memory into swap while it
cached the contents of my harddisk.

Remember it's not just your programs which use RAM: the kernel uses it
too for all kinds of things.  The more swap you have the more idle
processes get paged out for various reasons... and the longer it takes
them to become responsive again.

> If you want the system to hibernate and wake again, you need swap at
> least equal to RAM.

I was specifically mentioning desktops in my email.  If you want to
hibernate then yes, sure, you need more swap (I personally wish
hibernate would use a separate location than normal swap).  On my
laptop though, I only use suspend not hibernate.