heavy swapping may kill system?

[Matthew Dillon]

:I had a DragonFly 1.8.2 system lock up on me completely - even the console
:was frozen.  All that was printed was a long series of this:
:
:swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
:
:I hit the power button and rebooted, but I've noticed an ongoing series of
:this: (from dmesg)

    Unless the swap usage is creating a memory leak, I think the two might
    be unrelated.

:> pid 788 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
:> pid 806 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
:> pid 815 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
:> pid 825 (imapd), uid 1006: exited on signal 6
:> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
:> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
:> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
:> swap_pager_getswapspace: failed
:(repeat...)
:
:Investigating, one of the user accounts has some multi-gigabyte backup
:files in ~, and imap-uw is trying to index them as mail messages.  The
:error here lies either in my configuration or imap-uw, but: it appears to
:have locked up the system after a while.  Should that runaway application
:have been able to bring down the entire computer that way?

    No, the worse that should happen is that the kernel will kill the
    largest offending processes on the system, which is what it did.  At
    least theoretically.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>