Python and the need for speed

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de>:

> Am 13.04.17 um 15:20 schrieb Marko Rauhamaa:
>>
>> Not sure if this is still valid:
>>
>>    Still today Flash RAM cells built in SSDs have a limited lifespan.
>>    Every write (not read) cycle or better every erasure wears a memory
>>    cell and at some time it will stop working.
>>
>>    <URL: https://askubuntu.com/questions/652337/why-no-swap-partition
>>    s-on-ssd-drives>
>>
>
> It is true, in general, but the lifetime has gotten MUCH better due to
> overprovisioning and intelligent wear leveling. [...]
>
> For these drives with a capacity of 256GB, the manufacturers
> guaranteed ~70 TB written to them, for Samsung 850 Pro and SanDisk
> Extreme 150TB were guaranteed. Most drives withstood much more data,
> the best one being the Samsung 850 Pro, which did not fail until they
> ended the test after writing 4600 TB in half a year. The others failed
> at ~1000 TB.

None of those numbers sound all that high to me. It's a catch-22: if you
rarely use swap, you don't have a problem, but you probably don't need
swap space to begin with. However, if you want to lean on swap space
heavily and create a Python program that operates on 100 GB of memory,
garbage collections are going to create quite a rewrite load on the
disk.


Marko