Last night I ran a task for a project testing programme where memory usage topped 5GB at times. I imagine that if these tasks make it to the main site, lots of users who like myself, only have the currently recommended 2GB/core will either find tasks slowing down a lot or not be able to use all cores. Would increasing the size of the swap partition (these tasks are Linux only at least for the present) to give enough headroom be enough or are they still likely to run into problems? Swap is on an SSD on this machine.

Virtual Memory (SWAP File) is not a replacement for PHYSICAL (real) RAM and would most likely cause at minimum severe thrashing, unresponsive system, tasks not validating and/or a system crash.

Best to limit the number of concurrent tasks running for that project with an app_config.xml file.

Thanks. I suspected something like that might be the case. It will be interesting to see how the project copes with it given that there are an awful lot of set and forget crunchers out there and the set and forget crowd are unlikely to have 5GB+/core on their boxen.