I’m using linux mint 21.3, and a process (brave aka chrome) sometimes memory leaking, so eats all the RAM, and then linux goes into swap death loop, when everything freezes (sometimes the mouse cursor is moving), and nothing can’t be done, i can just see the HDD led blinking, and do a reset. Is there a way to make the system automatically detect swap death loop, and close the biggest ram user process, and so on?

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 months ago

    I’ll make an appeal to authority (kernel developer working on memory management):

    Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place.

    And then he goes on to say what I said, that it can make the OOM killer quicker to react.

    https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html