3 ms·
> And trying to run that much without swap would be even worse. No, swap makes it worse. In virtually all cases I’d rather die than stall or flap.
by morelisp 4y ago
> And trying to run that much without swap would be even worse.
No, swap makes it worse. In virtually all cases I’d rather die than stall or flap.
- Dylan16807 4y agoHaving no swap won't prevent stalling out. Systems can do that just fine by evicting necessary executable code over and over.
- lazide 4y agoOnly in a very, very tiny window. I’ve never seen a system sustain it for more than a trivial amount of time before it OOM kills something and then voila, enough memory. I’m sure someone here will chime in with their example though.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI mean, it happened to me twice in the last couple months on a laptop where I did a lazy install and didn't set up swap. Firefox and 2-3 smaller programs ate up so much memory that it stopped responding for multiple minutes and then went completely dead. I rarely need or set up much swap on a server, but I've managed to have the same kind of problem with the OOM killer not kicking in very quickly on a server. And on my desktops swap is able to soak up many gigabytes and improve my performance a lot with thrashing basically never happening.