SUMMARY: Action on swap full

From: T. S. Horsnell <tsh_at_mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 17:39:46 +0100 (BST)

Thanks to Tom Blinn.
The answer is DU will (and always has) kill whatever process it
chooses in order to make more swap space available in cases
where the swap area fills up. The choice of process is arbitrary,
the only recourse is to increase swap space on disk.


> AS2100, DU 4.0D patchkit 2, lazy swap enabled.
> In the past (ie 3.2G and earlier as I recall) the action taken
> by the system when swap filled up was to delete a user-process
> (based on I-know-not-what criteria) to make room.
> Since 4.0, this policy seems to have changed, and now,
> I believe, the system deletes the longest-idle process.
> Like inetd or xdm for instance. Have others noticed this behaviour?
> Is there a config param to make it delete user processes
> first, and only root stuff as a last resort?
Received on Tue Sep 29 1998 - 16:40:44 NZST

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