protecting some processes from out-of-swap killer

[Mark Felder]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2015, at 05:43, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 01:31:14PM +0300, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> > Hi there colleagues,
> > 
> > I have stable/10 on a rather big machine (2*8*2 e5 Xeon, 64G RAM, SAS+SSD ZFS 
> > raid10+ZIL+L2ARC) acting as a PostgreSQL server. 
> > 
> > To use such a big resource pool that is mostly idle, I'd deployed poudriere 
> > there (using tmpfs) too.
> > 
> > Most times this combination works like a charm: LA could be 60+ and no visual 
> > latency increase on SQL queries.
> > 
> > However, sometimes postgres processes got killed by 'out of swap space'.  
> > I suppose the source of problem could be that VSZ size of postgres processes 
> > (8-9 G) is bigger than swap congigured (4G).
> > 
> > Is there any way to prevent this, besides reallocating space for swap?
> > 
> > Quick googling does not help, at least I could not find answers relevant 
> > enough.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> 
> protect(1) ?
> 

Thanks for asking, Dmitry, as I've now learned of a new useful command.
It appears it has only been around a short time:

> Added Thu Sep 19 18:53:42 2013 UTC (19 months, 1 week ago) by jhb 

Very cool. :-)