People still use swap partitions instead of swap files?

“I’m not a friggin bear, I don’t hibernate!”

“Unresizeable block device at end of disk”

Classically the swap partition was located at the physical middle of the drive so that on average, no matter where the heads where, the swap partition wasn’t far away

swapfile gang

.rw------- root root 4.0 GB Mon Jun  1 04:10:37 2026  /var/swap

Yes, swap partitions are shit.

The real hotness is swap drives.

Just the use that your old 64GB SSDs were waiting for!

(Fun fact: in Linux, if you have multiple swap partitions mounted, the kernel will automatically use striping (like RAID) in order to read and write from them as fast as possible. If you have multiple small SSDs used for swap, the read/write speed from swap can actually become pretty fast.)

All I know is that I had 16GB RAM and 4GB swap and I used to get crashes sometimes.

Set that fucker to 32GB out of spite, now no crashes. No idea why that helped. But I guess I do have like 15 tabs open on the regular (web dev)

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