I have a laptop with extremely slow HDD. Everything runs great on it except when I use up all the RAM and the system starts to utilize SWAP.
Would turning of SWAP hinder or improve performance. Or is there a setting to force the system to use SWAP more conservatively.
My laptop runs Linux 17.10 with 8GB of RAM and 5400RPM HDD and i7 processor.
You can play with your machine's swappiness setting and configure a lower value like 10 instead of the default 60. See How do I configure swappiness? for how to change it.
The swappiness determines the balance between avoiding swap and preferring to keep free memory for caches and stuff. Lower values mean less/later swap usage.
I would not completely disable swap though, because if you then run out of memory, even just a tiny bit and very briefly, the OOM-Killer (Out Of Memory) will kick in and start randomly terminating processes until enough RAM is available again. You normally want at least a little buffer there. Doesn't have to be 8GB, maybe just 2GB, but nothing isn't the best option usually.
