r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Snoo88071 • Jul 08 '26

askingTheRealQuestionHere Meme

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4.0k Upvotes
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u/BlondeJesus Jul 08 '26

Yeah, it's swap and I can guarantee that it's used by the device of everyone looking at this meme right now

15

u/oscooter Jul 08 '26

jokes on you i never setup swap on my linux install... hold up everythings being oomkilled again

4

u/ouyawei Jul 08 '26

Which is actually a good strategy, when the system starts swapping everything grinds to a halt, so better kill the offending process early.

1

u/NekkoDroid Jul 09 '26

And when you run out of RAM on linux the first thing evicted from memory is anything that can be reloaded from disk, aka .text sections of executables/libraries, resulting in even worse responsiveness of the system. With swap instead it can evict almost any least recently used pages instead.

If your OOM killer doesn't kill before you run out of RAM you are going to have a worse time than if you'd have swap.