On Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 03:50:43PM -0600, Chris Murphy wrote: [..]
Problem and thesis statement: Certain workloads, such as building webkitGTK from source, results in heavy swap usage eventually leading to the system becoming totally unresponsive. Look into switching from disk based swap, to swap on a ZRAM device.
Summary of findings (restated, but basically the same as found at [2]): Test system, Macbook Pro, Intel Core i7-2820QM (4/8 cores), 8GiB RAM, Samsung SSD 840 EVO, Fedora Rawhide Workstation. Test case, build WebKitGTK from source.
[..]
To avoid such issues I disable swap on my machines. I really don't see the point of having a swap partition if you have 16 or 32 GiB RAM. Even with 8 GiB I disable swap.
With - say - 8 GiB the build of a large project might fail (e.g. llvm, e.g. during linking) but it then fails fast and I can just restart it with `ninja -j2` or something like that.
Another source of IO related unresponsiveness is buffer bloat - I thus apply this configuration on my machines:
$ cat /etc/sysctl.d/01-disk-bufferbloat.conf vm.dirty_background_bytes=107374182 vm.dirty_bytes=214748364
Best regards Georg