Question about RAM and SWAP on Windows Host OS

Question

i've read and appreciated the original post by Thompsonn.

At work i'm forced to use Windows as the host OS (I work with and prefer Linux) because of the mandatory requirements in certain applications we use and i can't virtualize it.

I've bought a new laptop a few months ago, with 2 NVMes, 2 SSDs, 64GB of RAM, i7-8700K and a GTX1070.

I happen to use many VMs during my study, work and hobby, the vast majority Linux-based.

I have at least 6 VMs open most of the time, and i see that the disk is used a lot, and the VMs actually use swap even if the RAM isn't filled yet.

To try to slow down the wear on the SSDs, i've moved the virtual hard disks of the VMs and divided them between 3 of the 4 physical drives i have.

Given that i have almost 26GBs free of RAM, may i use RAMdisks as swap storage for the Linux VMs?

Answer 1

You could allocate RAM to a RAM disk or create a swap file in /dev/shm, but that just consumes the RAM and makes it more likely you'll have to start using swap on a heavily-laden host.

Some usage of swap on a lightly-loaded host is entirely normal if the processes in memory are inactive. You can alter how aggressive the kernel is at making this determination by adjusting the swappiness of the host.