On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 18:45:00 +0000
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.

 Very unlikely - Linux in common with pretty much everything else
practices overcommit, malloc just makes an entry in the memory map nothing
is actually allocated until it is touched. These days malloc usually only
fails if it causes the process limits to be hit.

 The usual consequence of filling swap on any unix like system is
that the kernel will randomly kill a process in order to free memory to
satisfy the demand.

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