I'm in the same boat with that. What makes 16GB RAM + 16GB swap acceptable, when 32GB of just RAM is the same size and faster? Why, 32GB of RAM only needs extra swap?

16 GB of SSD space is cheaper

But if I upgrade to 32 GB or RAM, would I even need the swap? I guess my question is: why is swap not dynamic like pagefile.sys on Windows? The pagefile grows and shrinks as it’s needed. But a swap partition doesn’t; it’s size is set at creation.

What's your workload like, do you run a lot of heavy servers for development? Or do you mostly do browsing?

A growing/shrinking swap file doesn't really add anything, especially if you're thinking a 1:1 relationship with memory and swap. To me it seems like 16GB of HD space isn't that big a deal.

You can also play around with swap performance if you want temporarily.

https://linuxize.com/post/create-a-linux-swap-file/

Yes, it's going to be slower since you're using a file in a filesystem rather than using a dedicated partition, but it would give you a way to test it out. Some workloads will do better since the unused pages will get sent to disk.

Yo do not need a partition, you can use a file.

True. It's still a fixed size.

(It's also slower. The reason we use partitions is to avoid invoking a whole heap of filesystem code every time we want to access some memory.)