Re: [PATCH] free swap space of (re)activated pages

[Rik van Riel]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:31:19 -0500
> Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > the attached patch frees the swap space of already resident pages
> > when swap space starts getting tight, instead of only freeing up
> > the swap space taken up by newly swapped in pages.
> >
> > This should result in the swap space of pages that remain resident
> > in memory being freed, allowing kswapd more chances to actually swap
> > a page out (instead of rotating it back onto the active list).
>
> Fair enough.   How do we work out if this helps things?

I suspect it should mostly help on desktop systems that slowly
fill up (and run out of) swap.  I'm not sure how to create that
synthetically.

I have seen that swap is kept free much easier in a qsbench
test, but that's probably not a very good test since it swaps
things in and out all the time...

--
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