[ubuntu-za] Swap space

[Bill Cairns]

I have just discovered that my drive is very poorly partitioned. The
results of lssblk -

bill at Zita:~$ sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL
[sudo] password for bill:
NAME   FSTYPE     SIZE MOUNTPOINT               LABEL
sda             931.5G
├─sda1 ext4      18.6G /
├─sda2              1K
├─sda5 swap        94M [SWAP]
└─sda6 ext4     912.8G /home

(I can only assume that, way back when, I decided on 10 Gigs for my swap
partition and finger problems meant that gave it 9 Megs instead!)

I obviously seldom need any swap space, but I have been troubled when I do
a lot of image editing that I seem to run out of disk space. I suspect that
all my editing programs (and I use Gimp, Digikam, and Gthumb at different
times) have similar problems and don't free up disk space when they have
finished editing an image. If I watch memory usage using System Monitor, I
can see memory vanishing slowly. If I allow this situation to continue too
long, my system suddenly freezes up and (I assume) it is valiantly trying
to swap something out to that 94 Meg partition.

I have 8 Gigs of RAM.

So I wonder if anyone can help me?

1. Are these assumptions correct or possible correct?
2. How much swap space should I have? (I sort of feel that  I shouldn't
need any, but assuming that these image editing programs really do share
the same problem of memory leakage, should I at least make provision for
them?
3. I would really like to install 18.04 before tackling this problem by
redoing the partitions (and I have this dream of a small SSD for the OS
...) Is there an interim solution that someone can suggest?

Thanks for your time,
  Bill
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