Insufficient 8 GB RAM compels me to use a swap file?

Question

I have a Ubuntu 18.04.2 on laptop HP Pavilion G6 with CPU AMD A8, 128 GB SSD, and 8GB RAM. I use it to work on web development daily with Firefox/Chromium, Atom, Skype and React.

It used to freeze almost daily. After days of probing, I figured the RAM was used up by the system. Because I couldn't add more RAM (8GB is the max size), I installed EarlyOOM to kill any excessive process. Guess what? It randomly kills either Atom, Skype, or the active browser (If I use Chromium, EarlyOOM will kill some of its tabs, but if I use Firefox, it will kill Atom).

This thing never happens if I play games. Should I setup a swapfile in the SSD or add a HDD to put the swap file in?

I would use swap on my SSD. Here is how to activate it: https://askubuntu.com/a/1100126/566421 — pa4080, Mar 06 '19 at 06:28
If you intend to use hibernation (it doesn't work with all laptops in Ubuntu) the swap should be at least equal to your RAM. Otherwise you can try with something smaller - 4G for example. Here is one related question: I have 16GB RAM. Do I need 32GB swap? — pa4080, Mar 06 '19 at 07:03

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 06 '19 at 08:49

You can try with adding the swap file in you ssd let say 8GB :

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/swapfile bs=1024 count=8M

sudo /sbin/mkswap /root/swapfile && /sbin/swapon /root/swapfile

In the end since you already are on ssd and you cannot add physical memory either you go for another hardware or you limit your processes.

Insufficient 8 GB RAM compels me to use a swap file?

1 Answers1