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From: jmb@patton.wpd.sgi.com (Doctor Software)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Swap questions
Message-ID: <1990Nov28.163415.14317@odin.corp.sgi.com>
Date: 28 Nov 90 16:34:15 GMT
References: <9011150232.AA00704@koko.pdi.com> <1990Nov16.155730.2670@odin.corp.sgi.com> <1990Nov17.225159.13857@cs.umn.edu>
Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News)
Reply-To: jmb@patton.wpd.sgi.com (Doctor Software)
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc.
Lines: 18

Apparently, I was wrong. I've been perusing the code for 3.3, and if I can
still read C right, your total virtual memory is (real memory) + (swap
memory). If swap is too small, and a process has pages which need to be
swapped, the OS kills the process in order to avoid deadlock. This only
happens in the case that memory is filled, the OS needs to page
something out to keep going, and there are no pages of swap left free.

This seems to make the lesson be that you can run quite fine without
swap until you actually need to use it - but then watch out. There's no
garuntee of which process will actually be killed in this case, its 
just whomever has the page that can't go out.

-- jmb


-- Jim Barton
   Silicon Graphics Computer Systems
   jmb@sgi.com