In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)

Re:In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018) by theamk on Thursday April 21, 2022 @10:34PM (#31117604)

I think "Linux drops will drop executable pages without swap" is a symptom of machines with small amount of memory, say 4G or less. So it is pretty outdated for regular servers, and probably only relevant when you are saving money by buying tiny VMS.

Those build servers had at least 64GB of RAM, while executables were less than 1GB (our entire SDK install was ~2.5GB and it had much more stuff than just clang). So a machine would need to finely balance on memory pressure: high enough to cause clang to be evicted, but low enough to avoid OOM killer wraith.

I don't think this is very likely in machines with decent amount of memory.

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Re:In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018) by AlisdairO on Friday April 22, 2022 @12:21AM (#31118182)

Fair enough - I've seen it more commonly in smaller machines, but they're also more common in the fleets I've observed (and the ones that are more likely to run close to the edge memory-wise). I have also seen it in systems up to 32GB RAM, so it's by no means a non-issue in systems that are at least somewhat larger. The general observation that oomd/earlyoom + swap is a better solution than no swap still generally applies.

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