I experience from time to time when I'm working heavily, that my systems (Ubuntu 13.10) freezes. Syslog says, that a process had to be killed to to memory shortage.
Killed process 4693 (chromium-browse) total-vm:1386284kB, anon-rss:31688kB, file-rss:3424kB
That happens even if my swap is pretty much empty. I do have 4GB RAM and 4GB Swap partition.
Top says:
KiB Mem: 3932056 total, 2828880 used
KiB Swap: 4079612 total, 332492 used,
So plenty of room available. But then I found out, that some processes are not using swap at all. They seem to eat all my physical RAM without even considering swapping some pages to disk. I used "top"'s SWAP column to verify SWAP usage per process.
These are e.g. Chromium web browser and VirtualBox. Others, like Firefox, Netbeans, etc. are swapping.
So who "decides" what process is swapping and which not? From my understanding, this is done by the kernel, because from application perspective memory is memory without distinguishing between swap and physical RAM. Is that true or do the Chromium developer have the application set to only use physical RAM?
Thanks for your help!