How Swap and Memory are used is controlled largely by the 'swappiness' setting. The default is correct for servers but not for workstations.
swap - How do I configure swappiness? - Ask Ubuntu The Linux kernel provides a tweakable setting that controls how often the swap file is used, called swappiness. A swappiness setting of zero means that the disk will ... askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swapp... SwapFaq - Community Help Wiki - Ubuntu The hibernation implementation currently used in Ubuntu, swsusp, needs a swap or suspend partition. ... The default setting in Ubuntu is swappiness=60. help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:01 AM, Matthew Gillen <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm looking for some advice on tuning my linux box's memory management. > I've got an older workstation that has merely 4GB of memory. If I try > to run Firefox, and a few java apps (e.g., Eclipse), my machine thrashes > about and effectively locks up because of out-of-memory issues. > > For example: the mouse will continue to move, but won't change it's icon > contextually. If I hit cntl-alt-f2 and try to log in to a virtual > console, mgetty will eventually ask for the username, but after I hit > enter, it just hangs, not popping up the password prompt, and after 60 > seconds the login times out. Trying to ssh into the machine from > somewhere else ends up timing out. > > After going on like this for literally 10 minutes, OOM-killer sometimes > kills the right thing (one of the two processes hogging the most memory: > firefox or eclipse), and the machine becomes usable again sometime later. > > I have heftier workstations I can use, but this behavior is really > frustrating to me, because I'd like to think linux does good memory > management. I've tried using huge swap (2x physical memory). I've > tried with virtually no swap (on the theory that without swap, there > would be no thrashing and at least oom-killer would have to do its thing > without locking up the machine for 10 minutes first). The problem there > was oom-killer making bad decisions about what to kill (e.g., the window > manager, and then whatever out-of-control process is sucking up memory > just sucks up whatever got freed, and nothing gets better). At least > with some swap oom-killer seems to make better guesses about who to murder. > > Does anyone have any tips on how to prevent linux from thrashing like > that? The behavior when low on memory seems atrociously bad. > > Thanks, > Matt > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Bill Ricker [email protected] https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
