No.
There are three basic swapping scenarios.
- Pushing unused data out of ram
- Swapping
- Thrashing
To effectively swap you need SWAP > RAM because after a little while of
swapping all of your pages in RAM should be assigned a location in the
page cache.
I have not heard of many people swapping and not thrashing lately.
I think part of the problem is that we do random access to the swap
partition which makes us seek limited. And since the number of
seeks per unit time has been increasing at a linear or slower rate
that if we are doing random disk I/O then the amount we can use
the disk for is very limited. I wonder if we could figure out
how to push and pull 1M or bigger chunks into and out of swap?
I don't know if swap has actually worked since we vmscan stopped
going over the virtual addresses.
I totally agree. The fact that the OOM killer started is a sign that
the system was completely overwhelmed and nothing better could happen.
In this case my gut feel says limiting the total number of processes
would have been much more effective then anything at all to do with
swap. make -j reminds me of the classic fork bomb.
Well we have SAQ which should kill everything on your current VT
which should include X and all of it's children.
Eric
-
