John Pearson wrote:
Wouldn't having (practically) all your memory used for cache slow down starting a new program? First it would have to free up that space, and then put stuff in that space, taking potentially twice as long.
If the cache pages are clean (not been modified since they were read from the disk), then evicting that data will not take very long. If the program you are just starting is not in the cache, then the time taken to load it from disk will dwarf the time needed to evict cached pages. And there's also the possibility that the cache contains the data you are loading, which definitely will speed things up..
-- Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada To email, remove "nospam" from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
