On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Hans Schou <ch...@schou.dk> wrote: > 2012/8/9 Ole Tange <ta...@gnu.org> >> >> I just swapped a machine to death by starting 1 jobs per CPU on a 48 >> core machine. The problem was that each job took more than 1/48th of >> the memory. > > Another approach could be to avoid starting jobs when the system is > swapping.
You mean like the --noswap option in GNU Parallel? It would now have helped in my situation as the 48 processes started out as small but each grew to > 1/48th of the memory. > It take a very little resource to get the current number of pages swapped in > or out: > > $ grep ^psw /proc/vmstat > pswpin 83218 > pswpout 179322 Somewhat faster than vmstat (which is currently used), but probably not portable. /Ole
