Re: RHEL 4 improvement in use of swap? (compared to RHEL 3)

["robert infotility com" <robert infotility com>]

Quoting "Stephen J. Smoogen" <smooge gmail com>:

> The system has too little real memory for your tasks. The only thing
> that RHEL-4 might have done is kill your memory hog application better
> than the RHEL-3 kernel would. You are needing around 1 GB of real ram
> if you want to do both Mozilla, java and a big compile without too
> much swap time.

Others have reported the same symptoms on systems with
much greater real memory, so I doubt if lack of real memory
has anything to do with it.

This box has chugged along happily for months at a time.
The problem is that under poorly defined circumstances
(one author in this thread reported that certain grep
commands is a trigger) swapping completely takes over
all resources. The evidence is that this can happen
despite the quantity of real memory.

Robert Dodier