[ec2] swap?

[Robert Coup]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Eric Hammond <ehammond at thinksome.com>wrote:

>
> In my own production servers I prefer to run with plenty of memory and
> no swap.


Likewise, certainly I don't run production machines with any more than 256MB
of swap, most have none. Reason being is once all the RAM is consumed a
process has gone haywire and needs to die. The more swap there is the longer
the time until the OOM-killer steps in. Until then everything on the box
grinds to a halt, new connections just hang, there's no way to log in
(15mins+ to a shell), etc. With no swap, the out-of-memory killer steps up
immediately and kills off the hungry process. I'd much rather such an errant
process dies (and is restarted by monitoring) than the box grind to a halt.

Note this is a bit different from lots of processes (eg. apache workers)
slowly growing over time until there's no memory left. We watch out for that
via monitoring as well.

Rob :)
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