No point in messing with swappiness settings, trust me. You want to address the reason this happens in the first place, not disable to reduce swap.

I’ve had a nearly identical scenario at work. The reason? A data verification process that went through 100s of thousands of files to run their checksums and check integrity. This was working as intended, but the system alerts were firing because of that high buffer/cache utilization. So check which processes have highest IO and you might find the answer. Swap is just a side effect.

yeah, I have a 65" TV connected and it gets comically large. I wouldn’t be nearly as productive without it.

yeah, that phrase grinds my gears. If you heard from a supposed professional that they only do the bare minimum to get a pass, you’d never hire their services. It’s at best disrespectful with your colleagues who give a shit and have standards.

disk destroyer? I prefer just formatting and rsync-ing things. Unless I care about preserving metadata.

Yup, the longer you wait to update something, the higher the cost to eventually do that. I hate the “if ain’t broke don’t fix it” adage because of this. If I am the one who will eventually need to update it, you bet I will be “fixing” it more often than I have to.

never heard of this person, but an editor in chief writing like that must be a recession signal

5000km is the distance my grandparents would walk every day to school

For most things. The only exception I see is if you have really over dimensioned memory, or have a very predictable load so that having the extra reclaimable space won’t make a difference.

https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

I’ll second the other comment,. Establish and end to end encrypted backup of all data you plan to encrypt at rest first - at least the parts you really care about not losing. Ideally a “3-2-1” setting. Test the backup. Then look for encrypting your local working copy at rest.

I’d say that “struggles” is a bit too much. And it’s still 5x to 10x cheaper than the models they compared to in benchmarks, let’s see by how much they’re increasing that cost.

yeah, swap is definitely still useful and it gets used by the kernel well before the main memory is full

Rideshare “Stimulator” sounds like a softcore porn game

it’s not, because it takes swap usage into account, so you can benefit from swap without risking a frozen system

direct link to the policy

https://forge.rust-lang.org/policies/llm-usage.html

the only times I had OOM killer kick in, the machine was already frozen for a long time trying to swap things in and out and whatnot. So I started using earlyoom - it’ll just nuke that memory hogging process out of existence before it takes the whole machine down.

good tooling, though pylance can be mostly replaced by pyrefly or ty today - both of which are much faster and don’t enter “analyzing files” loop like I’d always have with pylance, or the CPU being pegged at 100%

these 1681 kids

This is so annoying and exhausting. Today I gave up linking a bank account with a broker via plaid because they wanted access to all my transactions.

I’m not in this area, but from what I remember from undergrad, real world systems have too many variables to simulate. It quickly becomes a combinatorial problem, not a reasoning one.