Re: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1
pacman (pacman-kernel@cqc.com)
Sun, 4 Oct 1998 23:51:50 -0500 (EST)
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH writes the following:
>
>In message <Pine.LNX.4.05.9810042005290.276-100000@tahallah.demon.co.uk>,
>Alex
>Buell writes:
>+-----
>| On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, Alan Cox wrote:
>| > And to boot a machine with 512Mb of RAM you'll need at least 600Mb or
>| > so of swap file.
>|
>| Why would a machine with that amount of memory need that much swap space?
>| I'd have thought it wouldn't need more than 128MB at best as swap.
>+--->8
>
>You missed the context: this is what would happen without swap-overcommit,
>so every active page of memory has to have swap allocated for it at the same
>time.
Why?
Here's how I see it: in a machine with a lot of RAM and no swap space, if the
RAM is full all malloc()s (brks and mmaps and mremaps and reallocs etc.) are
just refused. And that is not a problem, because correctly written programs
can actually deal with those errors. The kind of error we CAN'T deal with is
the random process deaths that can be caused by overcommitting. I think those
are completely unacceptable. No amount of speed increase justifies that
blatant unreliability.
--
Alan Curry
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