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> A seat-belt is a really bad comparison because there's almost zero cost to enabling it. Watch some documentaries about the time wearing seatbelts became mand

• floatingatoll 7y ago
  People still drive without seatbelts today, and still run into their windshield during minor accidents and die. But when they do, they will quietly be considered “at fault for” or “complicit in” their own death. They chose the convenience of “no seat belt” (no swap) over the reduction to “risk of death” (oomkiller) Their friends will still blame anything and anyone other than them for the circumstances leading up to their death, but in unguarded moments, they’ll say “I wish they’d worn a seatbelt”. They blame the person that died for failing to take an obvious step of self-preservation, even if they don’t realize it. Swap paging files have not reached this level of awareness, but we’re certainly a lot closer than we used to be to understanding as a community why modern system design requires paging files to operate in a dynamic memory allocation, generic work task, variable usage and specification environment. If you don’t, you’ll end up crashing into the overcommit windshield someday. Is overcommit good? No more or less good than cars than can go 150mph (as their speedometers universally claim). They’re both design choices that no one has seriously objected to, and that means that seatbelts and swap files are necessary.