[PLUG] Using a SSD

[Neal]

>
> Say your box has 4GB of RAM.  You have a 4GB swap partition.  What
> happens when you use more than 8GB of RAM?
>

Long before that point you should have noticed your system is running like
a slug. I would suggest something more along the lines of 1 GB, maybe less.
I hate to pick any absolute number because undoubtedly someone will take
pot shots at it, but there it is. Feel free to discuss the merits of more
or less as a warning device. Perhaps a process that watches swap usage and
notifies you (email, SMS, whatever) when it's above a certain threshold.
Must be am implementation floating around somewhere in FOSS space, no?

Swap doesn't save you from this problem, it simply delays it and
> causes the system to run *extremely slowly*.  So slow in fact, that
> you might as well have run out of RAM.
>

Exactly. You want it to give you a warning that you're running too many
processes, not have something worse happen with no warning.


> Do you know how Linux behaves when it runs out of memory?  There are
> ways to configure this, but it doesn't outright crash immediately.  By
> default, the OOM reaper comes to town and makes a mess of things, but
> it tries to make things fail gracefully, in a way.
>

Don't know what happens, especially given so many variants of Linux, but
always interested in learning.

NealS