Re: X server being killed a lot

[Thomas Klausner <tk%giga.or.at@localhost>]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 12:18:01PM -0400, Michael wrote:
> I've had firefox starting to get swapped out ( and everything slowing
> to a crawl because of it ) while in active use, with more than half of
> RAM being used as file cache, and nothing hammering the filesystem
> either.
> One would think the OS would shrink the cache first, especially if it's
> several gigabytes.
> 
> It helped somewhat to add this to sysctl.conf:
> vm.filemin=2
> vm.filemax=10
> now it still uses well over 10% or memory as file cache but seems more
> willing to shrink it.

I just gave that a try after X was killed again, setting the values
with sysctl -w.

Then I restarted X, gnucash and firefox and X got killed again before
all of them had finished starting up.

Is there some delay until these values are really used? Or are they only
relevant if we're below the magic boundary and afterwards they are not
enforced so much because the limit has already been broken? How do those
limits work?
 Thomas