[Systems] Load on treehouse

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Bernie Innocenti's message of Wed Sep 29 08:14:57 +0200 2010:

> If we have more than enough memory (and we sure do), swap shouldn't be
> necessary.
> 
> There are urban legends that Linux (or even all UNIX systems) cannot
> work without swap, otherwise something magical will happen and a dragon
> will eat your firstborn.

I have no idea whether it might eat my firstborn some day, but it
definitely does churn CPU, making the system so horribly slow that a
hard reset is often the only option.
I don't remember if I had overcommit accounting turned off on the
(many) systems where I encountered it (over the last decade, including
as recently as last year).
I usually configure a small swap place, even if just a RAM disk. This
allows the OOM to kick in and everything works fine (enough).

Sascha

--
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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