The out-of-swap killer makes poor choices

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,

> On 24 Feb 2021, at 12:38, Thierry Thomas <thierry at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Le mer. 24 févr. 21 à 13:02:14 +0100, Olivier Certner <olivier.freebsd at free.fr>
> écrivait :
> 
>> Hi,
> 
> Hello,
> 
>> 2 to 3 years ago, I stumbled against production problems on servers doing
>> heavy computations. Only a few processes (2 generally) were doing them, and
>> most of the time consumed less than 1/4 of the available RAM (2 GiB). Apart
>> from that, no other process was allocating any significant amount of memory.
>> Only some base default daemons (syslogd, cron) and sshd were running.
>> Occasionally, very big jobs would come, and one or more of these processes
>> would start eating up all available memory, until FreeBSD decided that it was
>> time to take action.
> 
> For such cases, another solution exists on Linux to dynamically enlarge
> the swap partition (something like dphys-swapfile or SwapSpace - see
> <https://github.com/Tookmund/Swapspace> ), but I do not know if such a
> tool exists on FreeBSD?

You can of course add swap to a running system using swapon(8), but I have no idea whether this will improve behaviour if the system is already low on resources.

> --
> Th. Thomas.

--
Bob Bishop
rb at gid.co.uk




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