What happens when the swap folder on your harddrive is full?

Question

So this is an "what if" question. It may not happen that often, but I am just curious what happens if it would exactly happen. So in short a computer needs space somewhere to store different thinks before or after an calculation. So you have the cache on the CPU (L1,L2,L3) and then the memory and the last is the HDD/SSD swap folder. So let's say your CPU is full the memory is full then the OS will decide to use the SSD/HDD.

Question: But what will happen when the SSD/HDD is full too?

Where will the OS store it? Is this different in OS'es (like Windows, MAC and linux)? Will the PC/MAC reboot?

swap space (place on the HDD to store when the memory is full) — , Jun 17 '15 at 14:25
this is no folder.. either a file mounted as loopback device, or a seperate partition. — Dennis Nolte, Jun 17 '15 at 14:26
https://superuser.com/questions/536901/what-happens-when-linux-os-out-of-ram-and-no-swap/536922#536922 — Dennis Nolte, Jun 17 '15 at 14:26

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 17 '15 at 14:03

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The OOM killer (http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer) will start killing processes. If there are no more processes to be killed, the server simply crashes.

answered Jun 17 '15 at 14:03

Jeroen

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Is that the same for other OS's? – Jun 17 '15 at 14:05
I don't have a clue about Windows. Mac is probably like Linux / FreeBSD, so that has an OOM killer. – Jeroen Jun 17 '15 at 15:21
Thanks man, and Windows is not that interested for me either so don't bother. Thanks anyway – Jun 17 '15 at 15:50

What happens when the swap folder on your harddrive is full?

1 Answers1