Messages in this thread | | | From | Ed Tomlinson <> | Subject | Re: Hardcore trashing without any swap | Date | Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:47:23 -0400 |
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On Friday 11 June 2010 08:53:50 László Monda wrote: > On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:16 PM, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: > > On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:10:33 +0200 > > László Monda <laci@monda.hu> wrote: > > > >> 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. > > I can read what you wrote but cannot really understand it. Please > tell me where my logic fails: > > No swap -> no dedicated space on disk to dump stuff -> no disk I/O > should happen at all
No. This is not the case. If the vm needs memory it will discard pages from that are backed by objects _not_ stored in swap - like executables. Only if there is nothing to discard will it start killing... That being said you need to read up on what Alan's suggestion below does - or add a swapfile (which works nearly as well as a swap partition now).
> >> 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?
See above. Its not out of memory that it can discard without killing...
> > It isn't. > > > > However if you want to avoid overcommit and thrashing play with > > > > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit*
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