Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

Sean Hunter
2001-06-06T09:29:15Z

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 11:16:27AM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> On 06 Jun 2001 09:54:31 +0100, Sean Hunter wrote:
> > > This is what Linus recommended for 2.4 (swap = 2 * RAM), saying that
> > > anything less won't do any good: 2.4 overallocates swap even if it
> > > doesn't use it all. So in your case you just have enough swap to map
> > > your RAM, and nothing to really swap your apps.
> > >
> >
> > For large memory boxes, this is ridiculous. Should I have 8GB of swap?
>
> Life is tough. If guess if you have 4GB RAM, you'd be better having no
> swap at all. Or, yes, at least 8GB.
> Or just wait for this bug to be fixed. But be patient.

This is just pure bollocks. Virtual memory is one of the killer features of
unix. It would be a strange admission to say that our "advanced" 2.4
kernel is so advanced that now you can't use virtual memory at all on
large machines. Needing 8GB of swap to prevent a box from committing
suicide when it has a working set of less than 512M is crazy.

I am waiting patiently for the bug to be fixed. However, it is a real
embarrasment that we can't run this "stable" kernel in production yet
because somethign as fundamental as this is so badly broken.

Sean