From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1760175Ab0FKMIF (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:08:05 -0400 Received: from earthlight.etchedpixels.co.uk ([81.2.110.250]:45497 "EHLO www.etchedpixels.co.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754663Ab0FKMID convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:08:03 -0400 Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:16:52 +0100 From: Alan Cox To: =?ISO-8859-14?B?TOFzemzz?= Monda Cc: linux-kernel Subject: Re: Hardcore trashing without any swap Message-ID: <20100611131652.053afebd@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.6 (GTK+ 2.18.9; x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-14 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:10:33 +0200 László Monda 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'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? It isn't. However if you want to avoid overcommit and thrashing play with /proc/sys/vm/overcommit*