Re: 2.4 VM & swap question

[Dan Podeanu <pdan@spiral.extreme.ro>]

> Yes, I know there's no hard and fast rule for the exact ammount of ram/swap one
> needs that will always work.  However, in 2.2 for a 'workstation' one could
> usually quite happily get away with having 128:128 and never have much of a
> problem.  with 2.4.0 and up this isn't the case.  This has been the cause
> of many people complaining quite loudly about 2.4 VM sucking and having
> lots of OOM kills going about.  It's also been called an 'aritificial limit'
> since one of the VM people had a patch to 'fix' this.  What I'm trying to
> figure out is if this problem exists linearly or just with 'lower' ammounts
> of total physical ram.  ie if I jump up to 512mb and don't have a webserver
> or database (ie I've got 512mb so I end up with a big disk cache) will I need
> to have 1gb of swap just to keep the VM happy?  Will 256 be enough?  Could I
> even live w/o swap?

Probably you'd live with 512MB of swap. As for w/o swap? You need it
atleast to hear the disks trashing and know you have to ctrl-c the damn
process, if not anything else.

I have:
spiral:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        254572      89936     164636          0       4352      48016
-/+ buffers/cache:      37568     217004
Swap:       530136          0     530136

With X, netscape and a gcc running and doing quite fine.