Slow, clunky UI and frequent freezes

[soundofthunder]

@deeplow

I think there might be an issue there, but not due to lack of memory. I did notice at one point that too much swap is being used despite having enough free ram

Well, when we’re talking about RAM and swap together, the two combined can be referred to as memory.

@Wollie gave quite a nice description of how they work together in another topic earlier today:

@Wollie

The kernel OOM killer mechanism will automatically attempt to free up memory by killing processes when the amount of physical memory is less than the amount of memory required to run all the desired processes. Almost all modern applications expect to be able to allocate and deallocate memory freely at run-time and tend to crash when this expectation is not met. So, having a swap partition or file is good for any user who is not able to ensure never running out of memory. This is most likely true for all beginners as you never know what type of application they are running. As soon as for example video editing tools are used easily all RAM is used even if 16 GiB are available. Disk space is cheap these days and e.g. with a conky showing your RAM and swap usage you will easily be able to detect that you are coming close to a point requiring the swap space, therefore implementing swap is from my point of view beneficial for most beginners.

@deeplow

I had enough free RAM so, in both cases, no swap was being used regardless.

Memory usage will naturally vary as you use the machine. While minimal swap might be used at this moment, as soon as you start pushing the envelope, it’s possible to fill RAM and then fill swap again.

The larger amount of swap space will certainly help, but if it were me I’d want to ensure that my blazing fast computer has more than enough physical RAM for my applications, browsers and games to live in while they are running; as well as sufficient swap.

@Wollie

If you are often run into swap then you either could think about the processes you run in parallel or add RAM.

I’d suggest a minimum of 16GB RAM would make all the difference long term; but all I can do is advise; the rest is up to you.

Regards.