Does it actually work?

Posted Apr 11, 2025 8:21 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Does it actually work? by Cyberax
Parent article: Three ways to rework the swap subsystem

That's entirely different kettle of fish. You can disable overcommit on Linux, add 1TiB swap on the 4GiB desktop… and it would still become absolutely unresponsive if you would run two rustc processes that try to use 20GiB each.

And yes, miracles are impossible: if you would try to run some process that needs 1TiB of RAM while physically there are only 1GiB then even on macOS or Windows you would have to wait, most likely, till the heat death of universe.

But using 2x, 3x, 10x more RAM than your machine does have, physically? With dozen of apps? That's Ok: system is becoming more and more sluggish but it stays usable. On Linux using even 2x more is, normally, a prelude to hitting “reset”.