Windows doesn't do that, though. If a process starts thrashing the performance goes to shit, but you can still operate the machine to kill it manually. Linux though? Utterly impossible. Usually even the desktop environment dies and I'm left with a blinking cursor.
replyWhat good is it to get marginally better performance under low memory pressure at the cost of having to reboot the machine under extremely high memory pressure?
In my experience the situations where you run into thrashing are rather rare nowadays. I personally wouldn't give up a good optimization for the rare worst case. (There's probably some knobs to turn as well, but I haven't had the need to figure that out.)
replyTry doing cargo build on a large Rust codebase with a matching number of CPU cores and GBs of RAM.
replyI believe that it's not very hard to intentionally get into that situation, but... if you notice it doesn't work, won't you just not? (It's not that this will work without swap after all, just OOM-kill without thrashing-pain.)
replyI don't intentionally configure crash-prone VMs. I have multiple concerns to juggle and can't always predict with certainty the best memory configuration. My point is that Linux should be able to deal with this situation without shitting the bed. It sucks to have some unsaved work in one window while another has decided that now would be a good time to turn the computer unusable. Like I said before, trading instability for marginal performance gains is foolish.
replyNo argument there. I also always had the impression that Linux fails less gracefully than other systems.
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