Is this possible?

[Peter Silva]

"swap is maxed out"

uh... if that's true, it doesn't matter how much or what kind of cpu
you have, it will crawl and die from time to time.   your machine is
sitting in wait i/o.   When "swap is maxed out" the kernel will kill
processes randomly, (OOM Killer) you cannot expect a PC with it's
memory (including swap space) entirely full to run correctly.   One
would routinely expect crashes as the processes that get killed might
be important.

Here is a healthy amount of swap use:

KiB Mem : 11733384 total,  2327220 free,  3294000 used,  6112164 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 24761340 total, 24761340 free,        0 used.  7137152 avail Mem

You should be aiming for all your work to fit in memory. Swap is only
efficient when it is used to swap out bits of memory that are not
being used by running processes (say initialization code, or code that
isn't used often.) If your machine is going to swap often, well the
swapping in from disk is 100x to 1000x slower than memory, so it's
going to be slow.

You either need more memory, or you need to run less stuff at once.
There are ways of doing that in an organized way (batch queueing
systems), but it might be more straight forward just to put some
sequencing in your work.  That is you don't just fire up many
background tasks at once, but rather a few at a time, planning them
out so that all running tasks always fit in memory.

use top to look at your memory usage and keep swap down...  It doesn't
have to be zero, but it will never work if it is 'maxed out'.

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 4:52 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3 October 2016 at 16:35, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
>>
>> My hope is to do things in parallel. I work with a fair amount of
>> data, and a large data run may take 12 hours. Sometimes I can split
>> that and run it as multiple processes. While that is running, I may
>> have multiple browsers, each with perhaps 50 or more tabs open. This
>> load makes my current box unusably slow, swap is maxed out, and
>> something very often crashes - I may lose several days of work. And
>> there's email, editing of docs, making diagrams, etc, etc. Perhaps
>> Intel can do one 12 hour job in 4 hours, but I still have lots going
>> on during that 4 hours.
>
>
> I'm ignoring all the pointless advocacy here.
>
> If you have stability issues, you need to troubleshoot them properly.
>
> You need to profile your workloads and find the bottlenecks.
>
> And if it's background stuff and concerns with OSes struggling to
> balance conflicting workloads then you should probably be looking at
> VM solutions, and partitioning off the background  number-crunching
> tasks.
>
> Throwing CPU cores at the problem is inane and a pointless waste of
> cash. Throwing slower cores is burning banknotes. And throwing slower
> cores *when you're not even sure it's CPU-bound* is just stupid.
>
> Sorry, but it is.
> --
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