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A comment on The abysmal state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared object libraries. Parent comment

Re:The abysmal state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared ... by MrDrMcCoy on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @02:21AM (#41845492)
Fair points overall. I think KSM is still useful and worth the overhead for things like sprawling browser tabs and densely deployed microservices.

I disagree that swap is only (or even primarily) for situations where you're running out of memory, though. It is useful for reducing I/O contention and improving memory utilization by replacing underutilized pages with file cache when it makes sense to do so. See this for more details: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

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Re:The abysmal state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared ... by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday October 15, 2024 @09:37AM (#41848464)
Microservices quite likely, but I'd expect browsers to get ~zero benefit from KSM; aren't browsers all thin-copy forked from a single process anyways?

And yes I sort of agree with swapping unused stuff so you have more room for cache, but that's only good for unused stuff; if you swap the programs you're actually running - even just zram swap - you're going to hurt performance.

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