Re: [tlug] A Swap Question

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
> So why not just get rid of swap entirely?

My answer to this is quite simple.  It gives you an air break before you 
hit the wall.  If you allocate no swap, your system will, without 
warning, run out of memory and start randomly killing processes.  This 
might mean for example that X gets killed because an X application has a 
serious memory leak.  If you add some swap, your system will grind to an 
almost halt giving you enough time to login from the console run ps to 
get the process id and kill the rogue process.

Edward