This article suggests not to create a swap space on an SSD drive in order to reduce its wear. On the other hand, it suggested here that swap space positively affects performance.Would it be a better option to drop swap? Or maybe some swappiness tweaks could let us have the cake and eat it. The device is ASUS T200TA, the only sure drive is a 32GB eMMC (the HDD is detachable) and has only 2GB RAM.
Linux, SSD and swap
performance;swap;ssd
If performance is good - you're not having to wait while switching between apps, with the disk thrashing and the activity LED solid on - then there isn't going to be a lot of wear to worry about either.You could allocate a 2G space for swap at install time, and later tune the partition/swap size down e.g with GNOME Disks.  Personally I would try 512M or 1G to start with.  I assume you're not thinking about hibernation (which would usually want 2G+ swap).Then I could see how much swap I used, and if I hit problems with out-of-memory or slowdowns with full swap.  I confess I'm not sure how I'd distinguish thrashing the swap (too much active apps, enabled by too much swap) v.s. the cache (not enough swap to page out inactive app memory).  In both cases you'd see the disk light on and pretty full swap.  Maybe vmstat 1 and watch the swap column, if I could test a problem case reliably.I would be cautious about 2GB swap on an eMMC (lower performance than expensive SSDs).  Linux desktop memory management has a somewhat checkered history, and the swapping won't have been designed for eMMC.If you use all that swap you may find the machine's become literally unusable anyway.  Running out of memory can be better because you get the machine back without rebooting.  Though it may kill programs you wanted & expected to survive.My GNOME shell with a few apps has about 1G used (swapable) plus 1G+ cached (read-only data/code, can just be re-read from filesystem).If you had punted 1G to swap, how long would it take to swap all that back, given your eMMC?  (GNOME Disks can benchmark partitions for you :).  E.g. 10 seconds to read it?  Then if you're swapping the previous working set out at the same time, the (slower) writes on the eMMC are going to take even longer.  Doesn't sound great to me.One small reason for swap is tmpfs.  My /run accumulates a meg or so, I doubt all needs to be in ram.