Can swap be used instead of RAM?

Question

I have an older netbook that I love. It's currently using a relatively recent version of Lubuntu. The hangup is its relatively low amount of onboard RAM: 1GB. This amount also cannot be updated as it is soldered to the motherboard.

If I were to upgrade its internal hard drive to a speedy SSD, would I be able to tune Ubuntu to prioritize it as a source of system memory? If so, how would I approach this during a fresh install?

I understand that swap will never be as fast as onboard RAM, but does this sound like a fair workaround?

Feel free to add any information of software and other platforms with regard to this problem as well.

Answer 1

Best you can do is to shange swappiness parameter

The swappiness parameter configures how often your system swaps data out of RAM to the swap space. This is a value between 0 and 100 that represents a percentage.

With values close to zero, the kernel will not swap data to the disk unless absolutely necessary. Remember, interactions with the swap file are "expensive" in that they take a lot longer than interactions with RAM and they can cause a significant reduction in performance. Telling the system not to rely on the swap much will generally make your system faster.

Values that are closer to 100 will try to put more data into swap in an effort to keep more RAM space free.

We can see the current swappiness value by typing:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

For a Desktop, a swappiness setting of 60 is not a bad value.

We can set the swappiness to a different value by using the sysctl command.

For instance, to set the swappiness to 90, we could type:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=90
vm.swappiness = 90

This setting will persist until the next reboot. We can set this value automatically at restart by adding the line to our /etc/sysctl.conf file:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

At the bottom, you can add:

vm.swappiness=90

Save and close the file when you are finished.