Re: why swap at all?

[Tim Connors]

"Buddy Lumpkin" <b.lumpkin@xxxxxxxxxxx> said on Tue, 1 Jun 2004 02:38:42 -0700:
> If I know in advance that filesystem I/O will eventually fill physical
> memory with filesystem pages (pagecache), then why would I allow file system
> I/O to force out anonymous pages on the system? Also, why wake up an
> expensive algorithm (kswapd) that walks all pages in physical memory in
> order to determine which pages are "Least Recently Used" on a system where
...

Incidentally, what happens when kswapd becomes a zombie? I've seen
this a few times, and I am currently posting on a machine that has
been up for 15 days, and which oopsed 10 or so days ago (something to
do with nfs, but don't worry about that - the machine is running
2.4.20, and is not exactly up-to-date), killing kswapd.

But I don't notice anything at all different about how the system is
behaving. However, I haven't been doing much more than running emacs
and mozilla recently - I haven't been running my visualisation
software that typically stresses the VM beyond usefullness.

-- 
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
Whip me. Beat me. Make me maintain AIX.
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