On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 04:40:40PM -0700, Gerhard Mack wrote:
> These things all seem to show up after a day but I noticed this during a
> compile.. why does it keep 17 meg in cache when it's 20 meg into swap ???
because the cache is more useful than the programs it has swapped out?
Isn't this a FAQ by now?
Oh, it's not in the list. OK:
Q: Linux is using many megabytes of swap while I still have a lot of
memory being used as cache. Shouldn't it discard the cache instead of
swapping out programs?
A: (MRW) Not really. Linux will swap out binaries which haven't been
used for a long time (eg lprd on many systems) in favour of retaining data
from files which have been used recently (eg header files while compiling
a big program). This is more efficient. Trust us, we're engineers.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jul 15 2000 - 21:00:18 EST