> Although it would really be interesting to me to see scheduler settings that would indeed allow something of a 'privileged' ssh or an OOB console that would be responsive even under a punishing load with lots of swapping, which is what the OP originally asked about. I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this. We have a small 1U test server with 2 entry-level SATA drives that was brought to its knees twice this week by an overzealous Java process. Load averages were up around 60+ and as a result, SSH access would timeout. I don't know if this behaviour is typical across operating systems, but it's frustrating to find yourself locked out a server just because a single process went to town on the i/o subsystem. Cheers Steve