When does swap start to be used? When does a process get an out of memory error and be killed?

Question

When does swap start to be used? Is it when the memory is fully used? Or when the memory hasn't been fully used?
When does a process get an "Out of memory" error and be killed by the kernel? is it when both RAM and swap are fully used? or just when RAM is?

Check this thread too http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/134202/when-is-swap-triggered-or-how-to-calculate-swap-tendency — Sreeraj, Dec 29 '14 at 06:24

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 29 '14 at 05:31

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When swap starts to be used is dependent on how you have your swappiness kernel parameter set. At swappiness 0 swapping will only occur when memory is fully used and at 100 it will occur as soon as possible. The default value is 60.

OOM errors occur when RAM and swap are completely full.

answered Dec 29 '14 at 05:31

Cthulhu Tentacles

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Thanks. I found that Imagick's command convert will write temporary files to /tmp, when RAM is full, is that swapping from RAM to swap? – Tim Dec 29 '14 at 12:01
@Tim No, that is not swapping. – casey Dec 29 '14 at 16:24

When does swap start to be used? When does a process get an out of memory error and be killed?

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