Comment 79 for bug 1518457
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| Alexander Mashin (alex-mashin) wrote | #79 |
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0f7b58d
(Get the code!)
I don't know, if the following comment be relevant to this particular bug, but here it is:
* If there is no swap, the kernel should not try to swap. As simple as this. If there is no swap file or partition, and there is kswapd0 in top, if even it doesn't consume 100% of CPU, it is a bug. Sysadmins are entitled to forbid swapping altogether (because it's evil, as on a web server swapping is effectively deny of service), and the most natural way to do so is not to mount a swap partition.
* If there is cached memory, there should be no swapping. Memory must be freed by flushing file buffers first. It is ridiculous that the kerner is generous to filesystems, caching their files, but not to the applications that really need memory, allowing either to swap or fork to fail. At the moment there is a misleading article somewhere in the Ubuntu knowledge base that claims that cached memory is not "eaten" and is as available as free. As long as the kernel is allowed to swap when there are file buffers, the latter are NOT free and available.