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Date:      Sun, 05 Apr 1998 18:20:46 -0400
From:      Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz@druber.com>
To:        dyson@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        dg@root.com, dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: swap-leak in 2.2.5 ?
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19980405182046.009137d0@mail.kersur.net>
In-Reply-To: <199804052135.QAA00680@dyson.iquest.net>
References:  <3.0.5.32.19980405172640.00915e30@mail.kersur.net>

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At 04:35 PM 4/5/98 -0500, John S. Dyson wrote:
>Dan Swartzendruber said:
>> 
>> My only quibble with this technique is that it would seem to make it
>> harder to tell if your machine is really running low on swap or not
>> (e.g. swap as backing store for stack/heap/whatever *is* critical and
>> allocation failure can cause application failure, whereas swap being
>> used to cache random cruft is in the "who really cares" department).
>> Or is there some way to tell the difference?
>> 
>It is difficult not only to tell if you are low on swap, but also it
>is hard to quantify being low on memory.  I have been thinking about
>this over the last year or so.

It was actually kind of embarrassing.  I convinced a local ISP to start
converting their servers from Linux (what I recommended a few years ago
when I didn't know different :))  One of the admins (who has some Linux
experience) asked me why it was using swap.  I gave the canonical reply.
He asked the question I just posed.  I had no good reply :(




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