death by swap

Posted Nov 4, 2009 23:49 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
In reply to: death by swap by jabby
Parent article: Toward a smarter OOM killer

On the other hand, if you set vm_overcommit to 2, you almost certainly want
lots of swap, especially in cheapo VMs. There's a whole raft of programs
that you cannot start with say, 256M RAM and little swap without overcommit.
Mutt and irssi are two that spring to mind. Lots of swap lets you
"overcommit" with the risk being you end up swapping rather than you end up
going on a process killing spree.

death by swap

Posted Nov 6, 2009 8:46 UTC (Fri) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link]

You can still set the vm.overcommit_ratio to something higher. I think in most cases a vm.overcommit_memory=2 and vm.overcommit_ratio=1000 is saner than using vm.overcommit_memory=0.
The only reason this couldn't be a sane default is that on systems with 32MB a overcommit_ratio of 1000% is still too small (but still if you have 32MB and no swap, your probably still better off with this limit)

death by swap

Posted Nov 18, 2009 16:12 UTC (Wed) by pimlottc (guest, #44833) [Link]

irssi can't start on a system with 256MB RAM and no swap? Seriously?