> and running out of swap on a running system is *not* something you want > to have happen, ever. It creates quite the headache.
That is quite true. A historical anecdote: a friend of mine and early linxu adopter (1993ish) had a 386 dx 4 meg RAM system. Back then it was fairly serviceable - I myself had a working SLS linux install on a packard bell 386sx/16 with 4 megs (later upgrading to 8). At any rate, friend decided not to install a swap partition. Bad move, especially on a machine with not much RAM available. And, my friend was then and still is a rather "casual" and light user of the system, mostly doing editing and so forth using emacs. Well, of course, on a small footprint machine you can barely fit kernel+some deamons+bash+emacs in RAM. Needless to say, he exceeded his resources and his machine seemingly locked up. But he didn't reboot. He hit ctrl-x ctrl-c to quit/save Emacs --- and guess what --- 45 *minutes* later, he got his shell prompt back. Yes, that's right. 45 *minutes*! All that time the kernel (which was likely pre-1.0 then) or more properly, the memory management system, rummaging through pages panicing trying to find room.
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