System ground down to a halt

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2016-05-20 at 12:51 -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2016-05-19 at 16:56 -0700, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> > I have 16GB of RAM
> 
> The old adage of "swap = 0.5x RAM" makes no sense for systems with >4G
> RAM, which many systems have nowadays.
> 
> Personally I would never add more than 2G swap to any of my systems,
> regardless of how much RAM they have.

So you guess 16 GiB RAM could be suspended to disk on a 2 GiB swap
partition? I wonder what kind of compression is used to do this.

> 13G swap is _really_ asking for trouble.

It might be unneeded, but why should it cause trouble? Swap only is
used, when needed. Unlikely that any swap is used at runtime at all, for
the described scenario.

Converting video might eat many resources and as already pointed out,
Mozilla browsers could become an issue by just a single website with
some animation and depending to the used format VBox could intensively
access the hard disk drive. I suspect qcow is slower than vdi, but that
doesn't mean that vdi access of a Windows guest is without trouble.

The bottleneck indeed could be disk access, but I doubt that swap usage
is involved.

Regards,
Ralf