RE: la la la la ... swappiness

Tim Schmielau
2006-12-04T18:44:15Z

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:

> > From: Horst H. von Brand [mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl]
> > That means that there isn't a need for that memory at all (and so they
>
> In the current isolated non-production, not actually bearing a load test
> case yes. But if I can't get it to not swap on an idle system I have no hope
> of avoiding OOM on a loaded system.

I don't think that assumption is correct. If you have no load on your
system and the pages in the shared application cache are not actually
touched, it is perfectly reasonable for the kernel to push out these
unused pages to swap space to have even more RAM available (e.g. for
caching the pages more recently accessed by the tar and patch commands).

I believe your OOM problem is not connected to these observations. There
might be a problem in the handling of OOM situations in Linux. But before
coming to that conclusion, I would suggest trying your simulated software
upgrade scenario with plenty of swap space available and without playing
any tricks with MM settings.

Tim