Re: Query about existence of way to free up unnecessary RAM usage
Bret Busby <bret.busby@gmail.com> writes:
> On 10/09/2014, Martin Read <zen75502@zen.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 09/09/14 19:42, Bzzzz wrote:
>>> Normally, if you _really_ reach the system RAM limit, init begins
>>> killing the least used programs/daemons (well, this WAS true with
>>> a good init, such as the sysV one…)
>>
>> First, the OOM Killer is part of the kernel, not part of the init
>> system. Second, it doesn't start killing processes until you run out of
>> RAM *and swap*.
>>
>>
>
> Yeah, but, whatever I tried, I could never get Debian 6 to swap. It
> would just run out of RAM and freeze.
>
> With Debian 5, I could trick it into swapping, by opening gimp, anf
> manipulating a file, and then closing gimp, and that would trick
> swapping into working, but, not even that, works with Debian 6.
You seem to have some issue with swapping. Are your swap partitions
(the disks they are residing on) somehow broken? Did you disable
overcommitment?
Even with overcommitment disabled, the system should only freeze or
crash when crucial processes are killed when it runs out of memory.
To prevent an undesirable state of the system due to insufficient
memory, you can use (a large amount of) swap space on a slow medium
because that may give you a chance to do something before processes are
being killed.
Always use redundancy (like RAID) also for swap because you don't want
your system to go down when a disk fails.
--
Knowledge is volatile and fluid. Software is power.
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