> Or you can process memory dumps of a machine larger than yours.
You should be able to that in software anyways - instead of loading to memory entirely, all it has to do is memory map the file dump.
About the need to freeze a process (group). I don't quite see how that's useful on a server. On a desktop machine I have never run into such a case where closing the application would not suffice. Is there an example?
Last - using the swap pretty much means no disk cache.
> You should be able to that in software anyways - instead of loading to memory entirely, all it has to do is memory map the file dump.
Should, perhaps. But in practice I have had analyzers gobble up more memory than available.
> About the need to freeze a process (group). I don't quite see how that's useful on a server. On a desktop machine I have never run into such a case where closing the application would not suffice. Is there an example?
Long-running renderjob, preempted by a higher-priority one. Technically they're resumable so we could stop them and resume the other one later from a snapshot file but that isn't implemented in the current workers. So as long as the machine has enough ram+swap it's easier to freeze the current job and start the higher-priority one.
> Last - using the swap pretty much means no disk cache.
I don't know all the tunables of the swap subsystem well enough but I have seen swap being used before running out of physical ram. I assume some IO displaced inactive applications.
You should be able to that in software anyways - instead of loading to memory entirely, all it has to do is memory map the file dump.
About the need to freeze a process (group). I don't quite see how that's useful on a server. On a desktop machine I have never run into such a case where closing the application would not suffice. Is there an example?
Last - using the swap pretty much means no disk cache.