Do I need to swap partition? How Large?

Question

My system: Dell XPS15 9550

Processor: i7 6700HQ

RAM: 16GB DDR4

Disk: Samsung pm951 (512GB NVMe SSD)

GPU: 960M

I'm new to Linux so I will dual boot Windows 10 + Ubuntu 16.04. I'm a network administrator, learning Linux Ubuntu until I'm very comfortable with Linux then I will be using Kali to practice pen testing.

How much Swap do I need, other advice?

Solution 1

In general is always good to have some swap, but the amount scales in a non linear way with the RAM amount. In you case 4GB would be the recommended size, ref:

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/do-we-really-need-swap-modern-systems https://access.redhat.com/solutions/15244

Solution 2

With 16gb of ram you should be fine for day-to-day usage. However, I'd recommend using a swap partition for learning effects (e.g. check behaviour of swappiness) and especially if you use hibernating, for which the swap partition in the size of ram is required.

Comments

[Pilot6]

In 99.9% of cases you don't need swap. I have 12 GB RAM and do not use swap.