From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1760228Ab0FKMxw (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:53:52 -0400 Received: from mail-bw0-f46.google.com ([209.85.214.46]:55433 "EHLO mail-bw0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754326Ab0FKMxv convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:53:51 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20100611131652.053afebd@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> References: <20100611131652.053afebd@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:53:50 +0200 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Hardcore trashing without any swap From: =?UTF-8?B?TMOhc3psw7MgTW9uZGE=?= To: Alan Cox Cc: linux-kernel Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 2:16 PM, Alan Cox wrote: > 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 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 >> 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* > -- László Monda