Toward a swap abstraction layer

Posted May 24, 2023 16:49 UTC (Wed) by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
In reply to: Toward a swap abstraction layer by farnz
Parent article: Toward a swap abstraction layer

But then that also sounds like a very much diminishing benefit. In the best case, your computer performs as if it had 0.2% more RAM. In the worst case, you'll run into OOM sluggishness. Is it worth it?

Toward a swap abstraction layer

Posted May 24, 2023 16:52 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Yes, it really is. It's the difference between the machine going sluggish when I run close to OOM, because it's paging code in and out all the time, and it's having to page the code I'm actually using, and the machine using swap to page out anonymous data, giving systemd-oomd time to react and kill off the thing that's eating all my RAM.

Without it, I find my system enters thrash a lot more easily than it does with a tiny amount of swap.