I have a few large applications that tend to lay dormant from time to time, and as a result Linux memory management shuffles them off to swap. For these applications this can mean very sluggish performance when I come back to them (after a day or two). Is there any way, short of lowering the amount of swap available, to control what goes to swap and what doesn't? I'll readily admit I know next to nothing about the kernel's memory management.
I don't want to stop the application from _ever_ being able to go to swap, but I would like to restrict it from doing so unless it is _absolutely_ necessary. I envision this as something like increasing a priority for it to reside in physical memory versus swap space. I've found a few documents discussing how memory management works in the Linux Kernel, but nothing to indicate how to override swapping. One method I've though about is to have two swap partitions of the same size and only have one active at a time. Then periodically (via cron), activate the dormant swap partition and then deactivate the previously active partition. This seems to cause the Kernel to shuffle a lot of stuff back into physical memory. However, I'm not sure that this wouldn't possibly cause the Kernel to go about killing applications with large memory usage as it will when you run out of usable memory. In addition, I would prefer to keep the application out of swap space in the first place as much as possible. -- Jamin W. Collins -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
