kswapd0 inefficient?

From: Richard Jelinek
Date: Thu Oct 18 2007 - 18:44:32 EST


Hello guys,

I'm not subscribed to this list, so if you find this question valid
enough to answer it, please cc me. Thanks.

This is what the top-output looks like on my machine after having
copied about 550GB of data from a twofish256 crypted disk to a raid
array:
--------------
Mem: 8178452k total, 8132180k used, 46272k free, 2743480k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 4563032k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5954 root 0 -20 0 0 0 R 62 0.0 96:42.61 loop0
6014 root 18 0 23744 19m 484 R 20 0.2 25:45.31 cp
255 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 8 0.0 10:21.82 kswapd0
6011 root 10 -5 0 0 0 D 6 0.0 4:15.66 kjournald
...yadda yadda...
--------------

And what do we see here? We see loop0 and cp eating up some
time. That's ok for me considered the work they do. kjournald is also
ok for me, but I ask myself: why the heck has kswapd0 crunched 10+
minutes of CPU time?

I mean what does kswapd0 do?
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-kernel/65380-what-does-kswapd0-do.html

And I have no swap - right? So it should just shut up - IMHO. Or am I
missing something?


kind regards,
Marcel
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