[robinsonb5]

Indeed. I think what's really needed is some way to mark pages as "required for interactivity" so that nothing related to the user interface gets paged out, ever. That, I think, would go at least some way towards restoring the feeling of "having a computer's full attention" that we had thirty years ago.

[FooBarWidget]

There is, mlock() or mlockall(), but it requires developer support. I wish there is an administrator knob that allows me to mark whole processes without needing to modify them.

[man8alexd]

There is cgroup memory.min

[akdev1l]

Seems the applications can call mlockall() to do this

[direwolf20]

An Electron app would mark its entire 2GB as required for interactivity. If you run 4 electron apps on an 8GB system you run out of memory.

[robinsonb5]

I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal window, log in and kill it. Right now it can take several minutes to get a Linux system back under control once a swapstorm starts.