Morgan Wesström wrote:
If I follow this advice, what happens when I compile something like
Open Office which allocates 3-4GB in /var/tmp during compilation and
I only have 2GB physical RAM in the computer?
If all the Virtual Memory (VM = RAM+SWAP) is exhausted the kernel will
try to kill the process that is consuming most of it. Daniel Robbins
explains precisely that behaviour in this article:
http://www.funtoo.org/en/articles/linux/ffg/3/
"So, the kernel mistakenly attacks the biggest VM-hog of a process it
can find, which is generally your X server if you happen to be running
one. So, your X server dies, and the root cause of the low-VM condition
(tmpfs) isn't addressed. Ick."
See "Avoiding low VM conditions".
