Re: [HTCondor-users] zswap for jobs

[Greg Thain <gthain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 4/8/26 07:04, Emily Kooistra wrote:
> > In my opinion, that's the advantage of zswap: the kernel manages the 
> > lot, there's no tuning needed (balancing between
> > zwap and disk-cache).
> Yea that was also my impression, altho beeing able to limit the total 
> amount of memory a job can store in zswap would be beneficial, given 
> this right now is unlimited. (Or well up to the system max), by having 
> condor also set memory.zswap.max based on a classadd expresion, 
> similary to the other cgroup limits.


Hi Emily:

Historically, we have been cautious about encouraging the use of swap 
space for jobs. While this can result in a increase in memory 
utilization and perhaps throughput for a well-controlled and 
well-understood workflow, it is easy for a poorly behaved job to have 
astronomically bad results.

I'm curious if your idea is that the *user* (e.g. the job) would control 
the use of zswap, or the *admin* (e.g. the condor_starter)? Already 
today we find that users have difficulty estimating and measuring their 
memory needs.


-greg