To swap or not to swap?

[lah7]

Swap isn't created by default, for the simple reason of wearing out the SD card and degrading performance.

See these posts:

Using a swap file on PI 3

Hi, welcome! The swap partition (known as a paging file in Windows) is where physical memory (RAM) is temporarily stored to disk., usually when the system is low on RAM. System performance temporarily drops when the system is “swapping”, and the system would lock up if it’s out of memory with no swap. For the Raspberry Pi, by default, no swap is created as this would wear out the SD card and degrade performance even further. It’s not essential to have swap, but desired for a standard computer. …

v16.04 resize option could also use a swap partion creation option

The RPi2 and 3 have 1GB of RAM, which is fairly limited even when compared to a smartphone. The Linux kernel’s memory management system is virtual-based, was designed with swap in mind, and not having available swap hobbles the system by using memory less efficiently(Technically, with a backing store, as the Linux kernel doesn’t swap, but pages memory. However, common vernacular is to use “swap,” so I will also). The kernel is loaded into memory, and AFAIK, never swapped. The left over memory i…