a better solution (for some cases)

Posted Oct 6, 2005 13:19 UTC (Thu) by efexis (guest, #26355)
In reply to: a better solution (for some cases) by zooko
Parent article: Swap prefetching

Agreed on the swap front. If a runaway process has a huge amount of swap space to eat through before dying, it can bring the system to a halt for an extended length of time. Trying to ssh in (if I don't already have an open connection), and then battling for enough memory and disk IO just to run the kill/killall command, is often impossible. So I tend to set a tiny swap, just for stuff that really doesn't need to be in memory, like 128meg or something. Now a runaway process won't cause a runaway system.

Not that it's a regular occurance, but with todays amounts of memory, this "1.5 x RAM" swap rule that people won't let go of, causes more harm than good.