On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Holden Hao wrote: .. > But in the case of a "Swap Death" problem its easier though to just > reboot the machine rather than wait for your ssh prompt. This happened > to me several times and it took me a very long time to kill some X > applications so I could recover the system.
I've only experienced "swap death" a few times. There's a quick way to "fix" this without rebooting. Once you log in, /sbin/swapoff -a. This will crawl for a minute or two. Then, /sbin/swapon -a and responsiveness is restored! wheeeeee!! Actually with 2.4+ kernel you can make do with NO SWAP AT ALL. The rule for 2.4 is supposedly swap = 3X RAM, or no swap at all. I've also tried this actually but it's disconcerting when Mozilla (which is a huge memory hog) or X (which has a huge RSS due to the mmap()'ed AGP aperture) gets killed by the OOM killer. Rats. :P In general though if you have 256MB or more, you can live without swap. Just don't edit that 10megapixel file in Gimp while browsing with Mozilla.. for that, you REALLY need swap. --- Orlando Andico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mosaic Communications, Inc. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
