I have a VM and in it a process that consumes a lot of memory (~200GB). Some sort of in-memory DB. I need to run it on a standard laptop and I cannot recompile it or see the code.
I've added 256GB of swap space with pri=32767 in /etc/fstab and vm.swappiness=100 in /etc/sysctl.conf but it just won't load the DB quick enough (stuck on 4GB after 24h; doesn't seem to grow anymore).
(EDIT: I cloned the machine, changed the RAM from 256GB to 4GB, added hard disk, formated it as ext4 and created a swap file of size 256GB (dd -> mkswap -> swapon...))
Why did it stop growing?
I suspect the slowness is caused by it being a swap space, therefore the OS is busy "swapping" (load -> not enough room -> deciding what to swap out...).
I'm looking for a way to "add more memory" but make the OS treat it as normal memory. Or maybe my swap configuration is wrong?
I know it'll hurt performance, but it is acceptable for me.
The VM is CentOS 6.