IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM. It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as…
Funny, but Linux is the only unix-like OS I've ever run where using swap means you have a problem. Other OSes have much more intelligent memory management.
heh, try using Windows when it goes into swap, Windows both desktop and server additions have the worst memory management I've ever seen and having no ZRAM and a pig of a filesystem like NTFS really doesn't help either.
Going into swap in Linux isn't a problem, it's a symtom of a misconfigured / provisioned server or an unhanled application memory leak, other than that the other only things that should cause it is incorrectly configured use of shared / reserved memory.
Disk based swap should pretty much always be disabled these days and ZRAM used to incresed efficiency.
It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…
IMHO if you can't not use swap without running out of memory in normal workloads, you either need more RAM or to work on reducing your memory consumption; swapping is for temporary overloads or gracefully recovering from one, not a substitute for RAM. It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as…
It was indeed a massive, not well discussed change and the kernel maintainers should have vocalised it better (not that I think the Ubuntu maintainers wouldn't understand it properly anyway TBQH) but yes, the behaviour was previously logically incorrect and had to be fixed at some point.
I stopped using Ubuntu after Amazon affiliate marketing showed up on the desktop. I stopped using Arch after I read the source code for SystemD. FreeBSD had quite a learning curve, but now it's on my laptops and is my preferred server OS. I love DTrace. I love ZFS. I love pf. I love Jails. I love ports, even though I generally use pkg. I love how easy it is to compile a kernel. The FreeBSD handbook is awesome. All th…
OpenBSD seems to do better on laptops driver-wise. (I run Open and Free, and started with Net, I have no dog in this race)
I've always been curious about *bsd on laptops.
What laptop are you using and exactly what does/does not work for you?
It's not just a bunch of people setting cm.swappieness to 0 is it? That behaviour changed and now prevents going into swap /ever/ where it used to mean go into swap as a last resort. Changing it to 1 fixes the issue and will act like the old behaviour or only swapping as a last result. Regardless, it's things like this why we never recommend people use Ubuntu - years of poorly packaged and tested software. If you wan…
Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 2011. In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.
Honestly, the amount of regressions, packaging problems, hacky fixes, non-stardard configuration and poorly set defaults in Ubuntu is disgusting, look at how bad NetworkManager was / is on it, it's not that bad on Fedora (not that I like it that much) and the whole debarcle with them doing Unitiy on top of Gnome rather than contributing to the community projects, or recently when they released an update that broke all USB 2 ports and if you got that update before they pulled ita and rebooted - you had no keyboard or mouse to work with, their own custom (IMO very gross) init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System which they're now going to move to anyway, their dodgy partnerships with companies like Amazon where they're putting apps / links on the desktop menus to Amazon (who does very little for the open source community also), it's just a joke and I really wish people would just move on to better distros or at least use pure Debian if they can handle the lack of packages. So often at work when devs complain their DNS isn't working or they can't connect to the VPN or they updated and now their machine doesn't boot - our first questions - 'are you running Ubuntu?' it's like the Windows of the linux world I swear.
The /boot bug is unreal, I just ran into that a few months ago.
It's super frustrating. There's no reason I need twenty kernels on my machine :-p
Ubuntu actually only keeps the current and the previous kernel as necessary and give the user the option to purge all the old kernels. These old kernels will be marked as autoremovable and by setting a flag in unattended upgrades config you can make it autoremove those. On desktops this happens automatically.
If you're Grandma you don't have /boot on a separate partition, you have all / on a big 120GB at least, so if you run out of space you simply know you've run out of space. Not perfect but not a problem for 90% of people I guess...
Ubuntu installer has separate /boot partition by default. If you don't do anything special during installation you end up with it.
No you don't. Ubuntu's default partition map is one big / and one efi(if necessary).
Yeah, Ubuntu still keeps running out of space in /boot by filling it w old kernels in the default partition profile. A bug that I've been hitting since about 2011. In spite of their best efforts, it is not the "grandma friendly" quality software it hoped to be.
Honestly, the amount of regressions, packaging problems, hacky fixes, non-stardard configuration and poorly set defaults in Ubuntu is disgusting, look at how bad NetworkManager was / is on it, it's not that bad on Fedora (not that I like it that much) and the whole debarcle with them doing Unitiy on top of Gnome rather than contributing to the community projects, or recently when they released an update that broke al…
So much written, so little sense in that.
Have you actually looked at Ubuntu, have you tried to use it? I'm not even going to go through your assertions one by one to debunk them, as most of them are wrong and unsupported by facts.
I happen to run most of the latest of things on CentOS (server-side only, though). My approach has been to package and deliver modern versions of various runtimes (python, ruby, jre) into specific directories for my apps. This way, I am not dependent on the system-provided runtimes which are an older version. For my work with Belenix (revamp not announced yet), I am working on examples where users no longer depend up…
Why don't you use Software Collections to get the newer versions of the runtimes?
Though I had a commercial contract in place for Software Collection, these were not as up to date with what the communities released (e.g. Ruby). Hence my approach of packaging and testing my own builds of these.
Crikey - they did what?! I recall a fascinating article / thread years ago about swappiness=0 not actually meaning what people thought it meant, and explaining why it was (generally) a bad idea. A low number, yes, but not 0. Doing some research now, and found a blog written by someone bitten by this change back in 2014-04 -- referring to the commit that introduced this in 3.5-rc1. Not clear why the change was made, t…
Exactly, people in this thread missing the point of the use of RAM. A perfect operating system always going to use as much RAM is available for caching and there are long running processes that can be swapped out to free RAM for more important use cases. Memory management and paging/swapping is an interviewing topic for SREs/systems engineers, and this is not an accident. Oversimplifying the problem does not help.
It's surprising that many professionals have broken mental models about how an operating system supposed to work. I think they have something like DOS in mind. I was just told last week about how caching static (!) files from web server in redis increase performance in their infrastructure. I was baffled.
I stopped using Ubuntu after Amazon affiliate marketing showed up on the desktop. I stopped using Arch after I read the source code for SystemD. FreeBSD had quite a learning curve, but now it's on my laptops and is my preferred server OS. I love DTrace. I love ZFS. I love pf. I love Jails. I love ports, even though I generally use pkg. I love how easy it is to compile a kernel. The FreeBSD handbook is awesome. All th…
Small review of FreeBSD (I used it for a very short period of time, so I could be off the wall, though). PREFACE I've been using linux since the mid-90s. I know how to use the console, I compiled kernels, played with the old xfree86 config files and all that back in the day. THE GOOD OF FreeBSD: * Stable. It feels like a Unix out of the 80s. If you know what you're doing, it'll get the job done. * man pages - Haven't…