[Cryptography] swap needed, or not

[tpb-crypto at laposte.net]

> Message du 23/04/14 23:20
> De : "Zooko Wilcox-OHearn" 
> 
> The theory is that swap allows certain situations that would have
> ended with a process crashing instead end with the process completely
> successfully. In my experience that's not the main effect. Instead,
> what happens is that the situation still ends with a process crashing,
> but only after many minutes of disk grinding (vm thrashing). I've just
> habitually disabled swap on all my linux systems for at least a decade
> now, whether workstations, servers, or laptops. Works fine. —Zooko
> 

That was a recurrent problem with kernels 2.2 and below. Try to enable swap now and open a lot of Firefox tabs and other things ... the system and the programs will keep up, very slow but nothing will crash.

Except of course if you consume all swap. That can happen with a few crazy programs that keep allocating memory forever and after thrashing the HD a long time will be kicked out of the system.