> the memory requirements are unpredictable (due to the copy-on-write pages)
On modern Linux OOM killer became rather good at finding the real memory offenders. Plus this unpredictability allows, for example, to transparently enable memory compression in Linux eliminating the need for swap in many configurations.
Can Linux do that? I remember when OS X introduced it, performance improved notably because the system did much less paging. Would be nice to have that on Linux.
(Rephrase my question: If Linux can do that, do I have to take any special steps to enable it?)
EDIT: Nevermind, I should have thought of googling for it first!
On modern Linux OOM killer became rather good at finding the real memory offenders. Plus this unpredictability allows, for example, to transparently enable memory compression in Linux eliminating the need for swap in many configurations.