[H-GEN] What size swap space is optimum?

[Jason Henry Parker]

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Andrae Muys <amuys at shortech.com.au> writes:

> Jason Henry Parker wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 07:33:45AM +1000, Webmaster wrote:
> > > Even with low memory and lots of swapping, any instruction
> > > sequence should surely proceed to completion this side of Xmas -
> > > correct?
> > Correct, *but* it may take a very long time if you have very little
> > virtual memory.
> Actually not necessarilly correct.  Most OS's with virtual memory
> subsystems can suffer from an OOM condition called thrashing.
> I suspect this is what you are suffering.

Well, I have just as much memory as `Webmaster', and I certainly don't
thrash indefinitely as you suggest he may be.  My system may sometimes
thrash for minutes on end (insert emacs joke here) but it makes its
way through eventually.

Certainly it's possible to do on systems like these (sorting /dev/zero
used to be one way) but I think it's probably safe to say that's not
what's happening in this case.

I find that most folks are all too ready to hit the reset
switch---it's something I *really* do not like to do[1], as it means
that you'll pretty much never find out exactly what was going on at
the moment of the `crash', such as it was (or may have been).

jason

[1] : Except when (a) I'm really pissed off, or (b) some non-critical
      bit of hardware would otherwise require me to put a head on it,
      insert a keyboard, futz around, find the root password, log in,
      blah, blah, blah.  Just hit reset.
-- 
Windows is user-friendly, but with friends like that . . .

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