Orlando Andico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> 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!!
>

That's a neat trick. Remove swp so the kernel's blind, then put its
eyes back into the sockets... But really, its neat.

> 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.
>

You can actually live with a 1:1 swap ratio, and for most people thats
enough. I wouldn't do that if I'm on 128M, though: sometimes you'll be
editing pictures and words at the same time.

You can experience swap death just by firing up a moderately big image
with the GIMP, save it as 'html' so you'll get a nice pixel array, and
load it in Moz. For *really* big images and low mem, it can take
forever.

Cheers,
Zakame

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