I'm not sure how to limit the amount of memory a process can grab.  In
regards to your questions on swap:

In my last job, we had a Java app that was memory hungry.  We had Intel
x86 based server machines with 4GB physical RAM and actually ran with
swap turned off.  Something to do with Intel architecture only being
able to address 4GB of memory and if you had swap enabled, the amount of
swap space was subtracted from the total addressable memory.

Kernel tuning is always a black art.  this link might be a good start:
http://linuxperf.nl.linux.org/general/kerneltuning.html

Jay Kline wrote:
> On a server I admin there is a custom application that likes to consume large 
> ammounts of memory.  Apparently, there are no checks within the application 
> when it allocates memory because it seems to kill the box occationally.

> I know its almost a flame war, 
> but in the situation where you have one app consuming most of the memory, 
> what is the best setup with swap?
-- 
scot

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