To swap or not to swap

[Bruce Cran]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2008 23:16:23 +0000
Frank Shute <frank at shute.org.uk> wrote:

> The alternative to not having swap is a machine that on occasion could
> run out of memory. I don't know what happens in those circumstances
> but I doubt if it's pretty.

FreeBSD behaves fairly nicely when it runs out of memory: when I last
checked it killed off the memory hog, as one might expect. There's an
argument that the memory hog might just be your important
database or something and the right course of action would be to panic
and make sure someone gets alerted to the fact the machine's run out of
memory; however the current behaviour seems good to me.

-- 
Bruce Cran