On Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:27:55 -0500, Benson Mitchell wrote:
As you say, different people will make different choices, but for me swap-on-SD is clearly worth it, so if/when an out-of-memory condition _does_ occur, I get a chance to choose which processes live and die, and to make sure any important work is saved properly. I don't wholly distrust the kernel OOM killer's heuristics, but heuristics are never perfect, and the cost in flash usage seems very reasonable to me.
My experience when I end up swapping to a hard drive is that the whole system becomes so slow and unresponsive that it mosstsly ignores console input, and I have no ability to kill things before the OOM does. Often the best way to get things moving again is a hard reset. And then watching it repair the filesystems.
-- hendrik