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I use Ubuntu 14.04 on my Lenovo E531 with 4GB installed. The problem is that when the RAM is about 70% full the system starts swapping. After swap is used (even if only 10MB is in swap) the system starts lagging and is absolutely unusable. After that I tried to empty the swap (swapoff -a) and it helped, but only for a while and then Ubuntu again started lagging. I used only basic applications like Chrome, Thunderbird, Pidgin, PhpStorm, nothing more. I've just run Memtest to test the RAM but it looks to be ok. Please, could anybody give me an advice to solve my problem? Thanks.

gabriel
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1 Answers1

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The reason people should use swap memory is only if there is a lack of RAM on your system. Swap is basically your hard drive being used instead of RAM, therefor it's comparatively very slow (RAM vs hard drive).

There are a few things you can do, one including upgrading your RAM ammount to 6 or 8GB or more. You could also disable swap altogether or change when to start swap

If you are running a mechanical hard drive you could also upgrade it to an SSD as that may help a little bit if you are bound to use swap.

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Xweque
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