I believe that an improvement could be made to the swapping algorithm if
it looks for large continuous areas of memory to throw out, rather than
single pages, the reason for this is that the swapping drive will be much
slower at gathering multiple single pages (i.e. 1 seek (10ms) 1 page
transfer (4k / 4MB/s = 1ms)) is much slower than if the pages swapped
were continuous in the process space. It would be good if this was in
addition to LRU.
Wheee... sounds a lot like what Larry McVoy suggested to Linus and
Stephen many moons ago. I like it myself too, however Linus and
Stephen have some reservations about it. mea culpa
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@caip.rutgers.edu