Re: A true story of a crash.

Michael Elizabeth Chastain (linker@z.ml.org)
Sun, 16 Aug 1998 02:37:44 -0400 (EDT)


On Sat, 15 Aug 1998, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> I agree, On my work machines, if they start running out of swap it's
> generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with the machine when
> it's gone through 128 or 256 mb of ram and 256 or 384mb of swap radical
> action that doesn't involve adding more swap is required to deal with the
> issue.
>
> As you say, When things get really out of hand, the idea should be to make
> it come back as gracefully as possible not bandaid it until it tips over
> for good. beyond a certain point adding more swap is just asking for
> things to get slower and slower. The dynamically growing swapfile is win95
> is a particularly good example of this. It will keep growing swap until
> you either run out of disk space, get sick of it grinding and reboot or
> kill a bunch of apps. Generally if you manage to keep a windows box
> running for a couple of weeks you end up rebooting it because the swapfile
> has become so huge.

While creeping swap would be a problem, I think that there should be a
daemon to add a little emergency swap. Not more then 32megs or so.. and
ofcourse it should shrink it once it's not in use..

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html