On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 01:20:31AM -0500, P Prince wrote: > > Linux does preemptive swapping. AFAIK, you can't turn it off, and if you > could, you probably shouldn't. > > It will swap out dormant parts of memory, just in case you start up something > big, like X, or Netscape, or Emacs. (he he) > > Under, say, 128MB of RAM, this makes a lot of sense, but when you go to half > and gig and beyond, it becomes less useful.
However, under such situations there is no penalty for swapping. The swapped pages are cached in RAM. The idea is that the kernel is getting a head start just in case it actually *needs* to swap later. If it does, all it has to do is re-allocate memory, rather than swap pages out to disk and then re-allocate memory. If it had to do that, then a situation in which some program suddenly tried to allocate memory would cause the system to grind to a halt as pages are swapped out. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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