Zwinger crawled to a horrible death again today. Reboot & log check showed OOM kills in the log, again. Noticed that _somebody_ disabled swap!
The machine's got 1gig of ram. That's a nice chunk, but apparently sometimes it gets pushed, and we get that OOM condition. That's not good.
I've turned swap back on (2gig).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Linux machines do not function correctly without swap. This is especially true with 2.6 kernels... swap can be 1 byte but it has to exist :-) As you are seeing, the OOM killer will go on a rampage (pun not intended) without any swap. The OOM killer can be disabled, but I don't recommend it.
Swap should be 2x physical ram. But one can get away with less.
--Ricky
Ricky Beam wrote:
Swap should be 2x physical ram. But one can get away with less.
There was a reasonably long discussion on lkml some time ago regarding this. The 2xRAM rule of thumb was useful with older machines, but should not be taken too seriously nowadays; I'd recommend between 256 and 512 MB of swap, no more (except as an emergency solution).
Cheers, Ivan.
On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Ivan Krstic wrote:
Ricky Beam wrote:
Swap should be 2x physical ram. But one can get away with less.
There was a reasonably long discussion on lkml some time ago regarding this. The 2xRAM rule of thumb was useful with older machines, but should not be taken too seriously nowadays; I'd recommend between 256 and 512 MB of swap, no more (except as an emergency solution).
There have been may jehads in the name of swap... There are numerous reasons to make swap 2x ram, at minimum, 1x ram. At the top of the list is the strong recommendation from those far more knowledgable of the linux memory management than ALL of us. Linux doesn't manage memory the way sane people do... "is this memory free" has a minimum of three answers. (in 2.6, it's now four answers.)
--Ricky
On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 03:18:16AM -0400, Ricky Beam wrote:
Swap should be 2x physical ram. But one can get away with less.
There was a reasonably long discussion on lkml some time ago regarding this. The 2xRAM rule of thumb was useful with older machines, but should not be taken too seriously nowadays; I'd recommend between 256 and 512 MB of swap, no more (except as an emergency solution).
There have been may jehads in the name of swap... There are numerous reasons to make swap 2x ram, at minimum, 1x ram. At the top of the list is the strong recommendation from those far more knowledgable of the linux memory management than ALL of us. Linux doesn't manage memory the way sane people do... "is this memory free" has a minimum of three answers. (in 2.6, it's now four answers.)
By the time a machine with 1 GB of RAM actually uses around 1 GB of swap, it will be about as responsive as the nearest brick wall, so you might as well not bother, like the previous poster said.
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