Linux swap slowing my system?

Question

Can swap really slow the system because it uses the hard-disk as a RAM unit ?

I have Fedora 24 (Gnome) here with 8 gigabytes of swap and 6 gigabytes of ram , but i am noticing a very bad conditional lag when using the system , when i open the monitor i find that the hard-disk usage is high .

Note : Although i used this laptop on windows and it was noticeably faster than here.

Answer 1

In worst case scenarios, sure, it should. That said, swap is usually the last place you'd store pages on, if ram was available, and with 6gb, you should typically not be experiencing that much swapping.

Typically system slowdowns due to swap would be due to insufficient ram + high ram demand (which results in heavy swapping) + slow drives - I've had systems with insufficient ram perform better with even a low end SSD.

As is though there's insufficient information to say if your system is having performance issues cause of swapping.

Something like iotop would show you what processes are using the disk and are using ram and swap, rather than guessing blindly