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swapoff

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Sysadmin
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

When working with datasets from PATHspider it’s very easy to max out your memory. When running an analysis recently, I found my computer locking up and generally being unresponsive. This new machine should be able to cope so this was odd, and then I realised that I was running two jupyter notebooks and the other had previously loaded all the data into memory, so this second one pushed me into swap. 6GB of memory got swapped and then the machine was near useless almost instantly.

Now that I have 24GB of RAM, swap isn’t actually useful. When I get to be using too much memory, I would prefer it if processes die instead.

swapoff -a

Hopefully now I won’t be able to accidentally lock up my machine again.

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