Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 12:06 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by malmedal
Parent article: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

> I had plenty of workloads that would work fine without swap(or at least be OOM-killed), but completely hang the machine when swap was enabled.

I'd hazard a guess and say this just meant `vm.swappiness` had been set to a wrong value.

Posted Jun 4, 2024 15:23 UTC (Tue) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

I did some experiments at the time, with real and synthetic workloads, only thing that worked was reducing swap-size.

The disk at the time could read 150M/sec sequentially, but only 288K/sec with random access 4K blocks. Typical for a 7200RPM desktop-drive.

The performance cliff when swap was just a little bit too large was so tall that I just turned it off.