3 ms·
I have had systems completely die from hitting swap a few years ago. This is not a 2000s problem.
by FeepingCreature 2y ago
I have had systems completely die from hitting swap a few years ago. This is not a 2000s problem.
- a2tech 2y agoI’ve learned to disable swap on my scientific computing machines where we’re working on giant datasets. It’s better for the machine to crash when it exhausts its RAM than go to swap. In my experience a machine is never going to recover when a workload pushes it into swapping because something has gone awry and that situation is not going to fix itself.
- oblio 2y agoThere are many reasons this situation could happen outside of your context and swapping on SSDs is comparatively harmless compared to the old days of HDDs. Random example: swapping due to VM. You just stop VMs.
- FeepingCreature 2y agoYeah on my current nvme linux systems, swap is just "the phase where the ongoing leak makes the system kind of sluggish, shortly before the oom killer goes to work". On 32GB, I ~never hit swap "legitimately". The most useful thing honestly has been a memory usage applet in the task bar. Memory leaks usually have a very clean and visible signature that provides a few seconds of warning to hit alt-tab-tab-ctrl-c.
- gmokki 2y agoWas you kernel new enough to have MGLRU (kernel 6.1+). After that improvement one can be swapping constantly and the machine is still responsive.