Jim, Angela, Vince, Wayne, thanks!
Yeah, I knew about the embedded linux - no swap partition thing. I use
several that don't have (can't have) swap space, everything is running
out of RAM. I just wasn't sure if the desktop distros possibly tied
stuff up differently somehow.
So I did as Vince recommended, and setup up a box to not use the swap
space. Works fine, mostly. After a while I started adding processes,
eventually exceeded physical memory, and then everything got
reeeeaaaaalllllllyyyyy ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwww. But no processes
were being killed off, and I could still start more. This confused me.
I checked around, found references indicating that when both physical
memory and swap space are full, the mm can start to drop executable code
from memory, as this can be refreshed from the binary on the regular
filesystem. That's the only culprit I could figure out, unless the
system is building up some swap file unknown to me.
I think the real answer for the instrument is to add more ram and run
fewer processes. The balance of contention between reading data from
one pci bus and then writing processed data over another pci bus to disk
is delicate at higher speeds anyway. When the mm starts dumping less
used stuff to disk, the extra io kills the balance. Or at least that's
my thinking.
Thanks for the input and the information.
-Charles
