It’s always nice to have a failsafe if some process has a major memory leak. Otherwise if your memory fills up your system completely freezes with no way to recover.
This isn’t quite true. The system does recover. The mechanism doing the recovery is the kernel OOM killer which begins to shoot processes to free up RAM. Now whether or not the processes you care about survive or not and whether they lost any data you care about is a different question. 🤭 That’s a problem elegantly solved on Android by the introduction of its more complex lifecycle which provides data persistence guarantees.
Actually the swapping is what freezes up the PC writing to disk like it was RAM is just too slow… If you don’t have swap enabled, either the kennel will throw out processes or one could crash cause of memory errors.
Regular linux users with >4GB RAM don’t need swap IMO. You can use swap for hybernation, but most people don’t even use that feature.
It’s always nice to have a failsafe if some process has a major memory leak. Otherwise if your memory fills up your system completely freezes with no way to recover.
This isn’t quite true. The system does recover. The mechanism doing the recovery is the kernel OOM killer which begins to shoot processes to free up RAM. Now whether or not the processes you care about survive or not and whether they lost any data you care about is a different question. 🤭 That’s a problem elegantly solved on Android by the introduction of its more complex lifecycle which provides data persistence guarantees.
There is EarlyOOM which you can configure to shoot processes except the ones you care about.
Actually the swapping is what freezes up the PC writing to disk like it was RAM is just too slow… If you don’t have swap enabled, either the kennel will throw out processes or one could crash cause of memory errors.
Hibernation absolutely rocks, though.
Insert 16GB of ZRAM here
Zram is a must