On 27/01/2020 18:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 27/01/2020 16:13, druck wrote:
>> On 26/01/2020 06:54, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> If the swap file is full then what will happen?
>>
>> In practice the system will appear to hang for a while, possibly a
>> long while, until applications which require more memory either exit
>> cleanly or crash, freeing up some memory and/or swap.
>>
> Er no. calls to malloc() will fail and serious errors in applications
> will happen.

When calls to malloc fail, a well written application will handle the
error and exit cleanly, a badly written one will ignore the failure and
crash - as I just said.

There is a third option, which is actually worse - the application
handles the error and continues to run. This will cause the system to
run at a glacial speed as it swaps in and out each application, hoping
that one of them does eventually exit or crash - hence the appearing to
hang bit above.

---druck

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05