James Bensley wrote: >> It will kick in, regardless of priority. >> >> But probably someone will come up with a small c program which eats all >> available memory :) >> >> Regards, >> >> Ralph > > I would be interested in such a program if anyone has one or a mega > bash script that can achive the same? > cat /proc/meminfo says it all, but if you really want to test this can do the job: [nthierry at tryo tmp]$ cat totalMem.c #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { int size = 0 ; while(1) { if (malloc(1024*1024*sizeof(char))) size++ ; else { printf("Total available memory: %d Mb\n", size) ; exit(0) ; } } } [nthierry at tryo tmp]$ gcc -W -Wall totalMem.c [nthierry at tryo tmp]$ su - [root at tryo tmp]# echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory [root at tryo tmp]# echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio [NOTE: the previous 2 commands must be run as root, and disable the memory overcommit mode. See man malloc (under BUGS) and man proc (search for overcommit) for details.] [root at tryo tmp]# swapoff -a [root at tryo tmp]# ./a.out Total available memory: 1487 Mb [root at tryo tmp]# swapon -a [root at tryo tmp]# ./a.out Total available memory: 2056 Mb This system has 600 Mb swap space and 2 Gb of RAM of which ~500 Mb are currently used by other processes. So it works, and shows that the swap is indeed available. When satisfied restore the vm settings [root at tryo tmp]# echo 50 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio [root at tryo tmp]# echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory