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A comment on Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work. Parent comment

Re:Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work by isostatic on Friday August 09, 2019 @07:39AM (#20653353)
> Because if you run out of RAM and have no swap, the system dies. If you run out of RAM and have swap, it starts swapping, which is noticeable.

Only if you're using the system, or are reacting to monitoring (if you can monitor it and the thing you're monitoring fails) fast enough

I'd rather have a dead system than one that's not working

But in any case shouldn't OOM killer come to the rescue?

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Re:Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work by dkersten on Friday August 09, 2019 @09:54AM (#20654305)
> But in any case shouldn't OOM killer come to the rescue?

Indeed. Its similar to the argument that segfaults are good due to fail fast. Wouldn't it be better to fail fast due to OOM than to hobble along?

If you're actively using the system, ok, you might get a chance to save your work or whatever first, but, in my personal anecdotal experience, that process is pretty much dead anyway and I have to kill it. Yes, my system doesn't get taken down, but if OOM takes the system down, why isn't the kernel killing the process that's eating all the memory? It sounds to me that swap is just masking the problem.

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Re:Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work by masklinn on Friday August 09, 2019 @10:30AM (#20654664)
> I'd rather have a dead system than one that's not working

A swapping system is degraded, not "not working".

> But in any case shouldn't OOM killer come to the rescue?

The OOM killer will heuristically kill random crap. It could be the process with an unbounded memory growth, or it could be your text editor.

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