SSD thrashing

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2020 14:43:26 +1000, Phil wrote:
>On 25/7/20 12:28 pm, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
>> On Sat, 25 Jul 2020 10:51:56 +1000, Phil wrote:  
>>> 790Gb free  
>> PS: Keep in mind that your SSD has got that much free space. AFAIK if
>> you allocate a swap way smaller than 790 GB, the SSD does not
>> overwrite the same cells of that smaller space again and again,
>> AFAIK it rotates and does use all free cells from the 790 GB
>> available.  
>
>Thank you for your reply Ralf.
>
>I already have a 2Gb swap partition which doesn't seem to be enough to 
>prevent SSD thrashing. I know that I have a few options and I suppose 
>what I was really asking is what others have done to prevent thrashing.

Ah, I misunderstood the term "trashing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)

Did you monitor swap usage by running "top"?

4096 MiB of RAM, perhaps - 512 MiB for the graphics frame buffer,
kernel, libs and apps + 2048 MiB swap = 5632 MiB

Not a Valid calculation, just a pointer:

5632 MiB / 30 firefox tabs = 187 MiB / firefox tab

50 photos * 4 MiB / photo = 200 MiB

I suspect that switching between 30 tabs is a CPU-intensive task. Maybe
the issue isn't the memory and/or swapping, but the CPU.