Top all-time · #1547
Chris Down
Personal blog · chrisdown.namesystemsprogramming
Chris Down's personal blog at chrisdown.name covers systems and programming. Since 2018, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 5 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Chris Down's posts to explain Linux memory management, mainly the 2018 'In defence of swap' article on common misconceptions and his 2026 comparison of zswap and zram.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called a good summary of what swap does and a good article on why Linux needs swap; readers are told to read it, and its TL;DR is said to cover the important bi
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Linux SRE and developer living in London, England, currently helping Meta scale to over 3 billion users.
Most-linked posts?
- In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)27 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2018-01-09
- Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-03-24
- The curious case of stalled squashfs reads (2018)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-19
- Preventing outages with pkill's new –require-handler flag3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-13
- Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode642 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-03
- /2019/07/18/linux-memory-management-at-scale.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-12
- 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-13
- /2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-13
- Creating controllable D state (uninterruptible sleep) processes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-05
What Hacker News says?
https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou... That seems to be the URL now.
Comment linking /2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html
on “1195725856 and other mysterious numbers”Submitted 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers as a story · 426 points
HN discussionThe link above doesn’t work for me, but the following one does: https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou...
Comment linking /2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html
on “1195725856 and other mysterious numbers”Submitted In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018) as a story · 182 points
HN discussionDon't do this. Disabling swap is bad idea: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)”Submitted Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64 as a story · 161 points
HN discussionhttps://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “What to expect from Debian/Trixie”Submitted In defence of swap: common misconceptions as a story · 150 points
HN discussionRelated article that popped up sometime ago on HN: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “Pop_OS 21.04”Submitted In defence of swap: common misconceptions (2018) as a story · 116 points
HN discussionYour system would grind to a halt anyway; swap is simply giving the kernel more options to deal with the issue. Without swap the kernel has no options when it cmes to unreclaimable pages. Obligatory link: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “What has to happen with Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space”Submitted 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers (2020) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI guess the best I can give you is this: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “Debian's /tmpest in a teapot”Submitted In defence of swap: common misconceptions (2018) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionNah, zswap is way better than zram: < https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-... >.
Comment linking /2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
on “Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead”Submitted In defence of swap: common misconceptions as a story · 68 points
HN discussionSwap actually helps with performance for the most part. Here's a good summary of what it actually does. https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html TL;DR that swap shouldn't be seen as "spare RAM", but a mechanism for paging out anonymous pages, which is desirable in many circumstances in avoiding OOM situations and making memory management work better. It paradoxically typically reduces I/O thrashing.
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead”Submitted In defence of swap: common misconceptions (2018) as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> switch swapp off and use zram instead Or zswap instead of zram. https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-... https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/
Comment linking /2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
on “Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead”Submitted Preventing outages with pkill's new –require-handler flag as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDepends on your usage patterns. On 8GB I gave it (ZRAM) between 512MB to 768MB RAM, and later on just using whatever values for the relevant sysctls AntiX was using(or their scripts created dynamically during setup/startup) at the time. It isn't just vm.swappiness , there are others, and they changed, or got removed, and replaced by others, over the years. And all of them sort of interwoven , influencing each other…
Comment linking /2019/07/18/linux-memory-management-at-scale.html
on “Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware”Submitted Creating controllable D state (uninterruptible sleep) processes as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy coworker at Meta and kernel memory management expert Chris Down already wrote about why you need swap: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “We're moving away from swap partitions on our Linux servers”Submitted Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSwap actually increases system performance for many common workloads: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “We're moving away from swap partitions on our Linux servers”Submitted Preventing outages with pkill's new –require-handler flag as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Programs, which allocate large amounts of memory without strict necessity to do so, are just a consequence of swap existence. "Thanks" to swap they weren't properly tested in low-memory conditions and thus no necessary optimization were done. Who told you this? It's not remotely true. Here's an article about this subject that you might want to read: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “In defence of swap: common misconceptions (2018)”Submitted The curious case of stalled squashfs reads (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have some questions. I started reading about systemd-oomd, then followed the link to its manpage (at https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/systemd-oomd.8.htm... ) then followed a link from there to this page: "In defence of swap: common misconceptions" at https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html ). The first line of the tl;dr is: "Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functionin…
Comment linking /2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
on “Systemd 248 RC3: systemd-oomd is now considered fully supported”Submitted Preventing outages with pkill's new –require-handler flag as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
