Is it possible to have the system preemptively swap out inactive pages (vm.swappiness
), but invoke the oom-killer when the system runs out of RAM (as opposed to running out of memory) and is forced to swap?
The ultimate goal is to keep the system from grinding to a halt when it starts thrashing the disk because of major page faults, but still let inactive pages get swapped out.
Another desire would be to configure how much swap memory the system is forced to use before oom-killer triggers. This way the system can dip into swap just a little bit, as long as it doesn't go too far. Or I could set such a threshold to trigger oom-killer before using all the RAM so there will always be room for the file system cache (and thus avoid more disk thrashing).
It doesn't seem like this would be that hard to do. It seems like you could just tell the oom-killer to trigger when the system has X ram used/free. But this is why I'm asking; I don't know.
For clarification, I am not looking to turn off swap, or adjust the vm.swappiness
parameter