Top all-time · #1658
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.
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
- /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
- 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-13
- /2019/07/18/linux-memory-management-at-scale.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-12
- Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode642 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-03
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
