On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:10:33 +0200
László Monda <laci@monda.hu> wrote:

quoted text
> Hi List,
> 
> The problem I'm facing with is very simple, yet extremely irritating
> in nature.  I have a laptop with 4G RAM and I don't use any swap.
> Whenever the RAM is full my system keeps trashing.  This makes X and
> SSH completely unresponsive for about a hour then a bunch of processes
> gets killed and it's usable again.
> 
> How is possible that my system is trashing even though I don't use any swap?

Because you don't have any swap. Its having to dump stuff it doesn't want
to like bits of applications that it can retrieve back from disk.

quoted text
> I'd expect the kernel to immediately kill the largest process without
> any trashing so I could continue my work right after the event.  How
> is it possible to configure?

It isn't.

However if you want to avoid overcommit and thrashing play with 

/proc/sys/vm/overcommit*
--
unsubscribe notice
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/