Re: 2.1.91 swap performance: jerky.

Itai Nahshon (nahshon@actcom.co.il)
Sat, 28 Mar 1998 05:15:48 +0300


Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> This is intentional. The background swapping tries to swap out enough
> stuff that we're never really low on memory (and that means that it
> tries to keep at least one 128kB _contiguous_ area free, for example -
> which in turn tends to indicate a few megs of real free memory).
>

The idea sounds right, I have questions regarding limitation on
current implementation:
1. If something is swapped out but the pages that it occupied
never used later, will it have to be paged-in from disk or can
the copy in memory be reused without any farter io?

2. Do the background swapper compete with interactive processes
on the disk bandwith?

Itai

-- 
Itai Nahshon   nahshon@actcom.co.il
        Also   nahshon@vnet.ibm.com

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