[toast0]

FreeBSD isn't Linux, but I've had FreeBSD machines fill their swap and work just fine for months. I had one machine that had a ram issue and started up with a comically small amount of ram (maybe 4 mb instead of 256 mb... It was a while ago) and just ran a little slow, but it was lightly loaded.

I've also had plenty of machines that fill the swap and then processes either crash when malloc fails or the kernel kills some stuff (sometimes the wrong thing) or something things just hang. Measuring memory pressure is tricky, a small swap partition (I like 512 MB, but limit to 2x ram if you're running vintage/exotic hardware that's got less than 256MB) gives you some room to monitor and react to memory usage spikes without instantly falling over, but without thrashing for long.

You should monitor (or at least look at) both swap used % and also pages/second. If the pages/second is low, you're probably fine even with a high % use, you can take your time to figure out the issue; if pages/second is high, you better find it quick.

[lazide]

The issue is specific to Linux. I’ve had Solaris and SunOS boxes (years ago) also do fine.