On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 6:02 PM Tomas Pospisek <tpo2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 13.03.23 21:25, Joe Conway wrote: > > > Hmm, well big +1 for having swap turned on, but I recommend setting > > "vm.overcommit_memory=2" even so. > > I've snipped out the context here, since my advice is very unspecific: > do use swap only as a safety net. Once your system starts swapping > performance goes down the toilet. To use swap as a safety net, set swappiness to a low value, like 2. Two will keep most data in RAM and reduce (but not eliminate) spilling to the file system. I have a bunch of old ARM dev boards that are resource constrained. They use SDcards, which have a limited lifetime based on writes. I give the boards a 1 GB swap file to avoid OOM kills when running the compiler on C++ programs. And I configure them with a swappiness of 2 to reduce swapping. Jeff