Hardcore trashing without any swap

[LÃszlà Monda]

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?

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?

laci@nitehawk:~$ uname -a
Linux nitehawk 2.6.31-20-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 12 04:38:19
UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I'd gladly provide any more details but I'm not sure what is relevant
and I guess it's a pretty general problem so you're welcomed to ask
about any more information.

Thank you very much for your answer in advance!

PS: Please CC me because I'm not on the list.

-- 
LÃszlà Monda <http://monda.hu>
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/