Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work
Swap, the sub religion.<p>I&#x27;ve wobbled back and forward on swap. In the early days I used to be annoyed by how much disk space it&#x27;d take. (an 8 gig disk with 1 gig for swap is too much)<p>I&#x27;ve run an 8 core machine with only 2 gigs of ram, and tried to compile something with boost in it. swap allowed me to kill it, and recover the system.<p>I&#x27;ve run VMs with no swap, some swap and loads.<p>However, what I&#x27;ve never done is actually benchmarked the same workload on machines with no, some and loads of swap. However, I generally defer to Rachel, because Rachel has been there and been bitten by that before.<p>On this point: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rachelbythebay.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;meta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rachelbythebay.com&#x2F;w&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;meta&#x2F;</a> which everyone should read and digest, this remark jumped out:<p>&gt;&quot;This is so easy to test for&quot;<p>If I ever say this and never qualify it, it should read: &quot;haha, yeah, I made that same mistake, that&#x27;s why I test for it now.&quot;<p>The only reason why I am &quot;better&quot;[I hope] than my younger self, is because I&#x27;ve made a bucket load of mistakes before. Some of them are technical, but to be honest a load of them are societal. (as in, bleating like Cassandra and not being able to affect change.)<p>If we, as &quot;engineers&quot; are to grow as a class of people, we have to actually learn from other people&#x27;s mistakes, not just use them as bias confirmation. This is why I like blog posts where they lay out the problem, outfall, cause, workaround and eventual solution.