Re: pkg upgrade, ZFS, swap on, vm.pageout_oom_seq

From: Graham Perrin <grahamperrin_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2025 06:13:10 UTC
On 07/09/2025 05:11, Mark Millard wrote:

> On Sep 6, 2025, at 19:10, Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> …


> …
>
> So you are saying at this point that the combination for
> RAM+SWAP inside the VM is:
>
> 1 GiByte RAM in VM and 8 GiByte SWAP in that VM as well?


Yes.


> If yes, that should have produced a warning about potential
> mistuning …


True.

I spent years ignoring the kern.maxswzone warning, partly because I 
never noticed any adverse effect from ignorance. When set to 16 G on 
hardware with 32 G RAM, the amount of swap used was sometimes close to 
the amount available.

Today I found the variable in loader_simp(8) under 
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=loader_simp&sektion=8&manpath=freebsd-current#BUILTIN%09COMMANDS>, 



> … If no value is provided, the system allocates enough memory to 
> handle an amount of swap that corresponds to eight times the amount of 
> physical memory present in the system.
>
> Note that swap metadata can be fragmented, which means that the system 
> can run out of space before it reaches the theoretical limit.  
> Therefore, care should be taken to not configure more swap than 
> approximately half of the theoretical maximum.
>
> Running out of space for swap metadata can leave the system in an 
> unrecoverable state.  Therefore, you should only change this parameter 
> if you need to greatly extend the KVM reservation for other resources 
> such as …


Without me attempting to perform any calculation: I reckon, I always did 
well (no unexpected run-out) by _not_ providing a value.