On the swap aspect: I absolutely hate Linux's behavior with swap enabled, as described in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479622 http

On the swap aspect: I absolutely hate Linux's behavior with swap enabled, as described in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479622 It makes sense that it can also be broken with swap disabled: paging out too many file-backed pages can also lead to an unresponsive system. > Earlier this week, a post to the linux-kernel mailing list talking about what happens when Linux is low on memory and doesn't have swap started making the rounds. ... Now, here we are in 2019, and we have a fresh set of people still fighting over it, like it's some kind of brand new dilemma. It's not. The problem isn't new, but the approach I saw them discussing (use the new PSI stuff to OOM kill early) is new—PSI was only added ~a year ago, iirc. So I think this comment is unnecessarily dismissive. I've seen the systems behave badly without swap. I don't see the bad swapless behavior as often personally, but I believe it exists. (In particular, I haven't tried the reproduction instructions in the lkml thread.) I don't know how the "tinyswap" approach is supposed to help—I'd love details. Swapless with the PSI-based OOM killing is an approach that actually makes sense to me in theory.