Swap on pfSense?

[thearamadon]

I recently moved my pfSense install to another hard drive with new partition table, and I noticed that the swap usage on the dashboard was gone.

I have a swap partition, and it's in the fstab as
/dev/gptid/b47eb230-ee07-11ec-870e-6805ca08cf70 none swap sw 0 0

but if I run swapctl -l, I get

Device:       512-blocks      Used:

If I run swapon -a, then swapctl -l, again, I get

Device:       512-blocks      Used:
/dev/gptid/b47eb230-ee07-11ec-870e-6805ca08cf70    8388608          0

so obviously the fstab is fine...

What gives? Am I just misremembering that swap was on before? Do I even really need a swap partition for pfSense? I've read that it's great for FreeBSD's memory allocator, but I'm not sure pfSense even has enough processes running for it to matter.

Thanks!

[stephenw10]

Generally you don't need swap and if you see pfSense using swap then it's usually a sign that something misconfigured.

Steve

[thearamadon]

@stephenw10 Thanks!