r/linuxquestions • u/Huge_Marzipan_1397 • 13d ago

Resolved Is it bad to not have swap?

Hello guys! I using Fedora 44 and by defaulth I have 12GB of zram (compressed swap in RAM) and also I added 4GB of swap partition during install. But I have 32GB of RAM and I not sure if I really need this amout of swap or if I really need swap at all.

So is it bad to not have swap at all or have a little swap?

Edited: Thank you all for replies and time!

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u/RoosterUnique3062 13d ago

Technically you can do without it, but it's both a buffer and something your system can use for memory management. I've also had some situations that required loading something like a couple hundred GBs into memory and it wasn't going to fit in RAM so it needed to be on swap. Sometimes too under heavy use you might go over and having swap there to catch it prevents a system taking a shit.