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Virtual memory is always on... If you actually hit swap the system effectively deadlocks anyway because the swap daemon is too dumb by being too fair. Persisten
by angry_octet 5y ago
Virtual memory is always on... If you actually hit swap the system effectively deadlocks anyway because the swap daemon is too dumb by being too fair. Persistent memory might change this but it needs so much work.
- trhway 5y agoit was a throwback down the memory lane and the years before my first Linux in 1995 i had been dealing with Windows where configuration of swap was "configuring virtual memory", so i automatically used that term. > If you actually hit swap the system effectively deadlocks anyway that depends. In many cases in the past the options would be either with swap and thus slow or pretty much not at all. And again these days there is so much memory that there is always a way to avoid the swapping. Though i've met funny situations in recent years like when a several terabyte sized database process would get killed by the OOMKiller on a machine with overcommit left on and no swap configured.
- angry_octet 5y agoOOM kill exists because swap is not being useful. A process failure is something you can deal with, livelock isn't. If you have an algorithm that works out of core then you'll never hit swap because you maintain the working set below memory limits.