> > Say your box has 4GB of RAM. You have a 4GB swap partition. What > happens when you use more than 8GB of RAM? >
Long before that point you should have noticed your system is running like a slug. I would suggest something more along the lines of 1 GB, maybe less. I hate to pick any absolute number because undoubtedly someone will take pot shots at it, but there it is. Feel free to discuss the merits of more or less as a warning device. Perhaps a process that watches swap usage and notifies you (email, SMS, whatever) when it's above a certain threshold. Must be am implementation floating around somewhere in FOSS space, no? Swap doesn't save you from this problem, it simply delays it and > causes the system to run *extremely slowly*. So slow in fact, that > you might as well have run out of RAM. > Exactly. You want it to give you a warning that you're running too many processes, not have something worse happen with no warning. > Do you know how Linux behaves when it runs out of memory? There are > ways to configure this, but it doesn't outright crash immediately. By > default, the OOM reaper comes to town and makes a mess of things, but > it tries to make things fail gracefully, in a way. > Don't know what happens, especially given so many variants of Linux, but always interested in learning. NealS _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug