On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, A Darren Dunham wrote: > > I think these paragraphs are referring to two different concepts with > "swap". Swapfiles or backing store in the first, and virtual memory > space in the second.
The "swap" area is mis-named since Solaris never "swaps". Some older operating systems would put an entire program in the swap area when the system ran short on memory and would have to "swap" between programs. Solaris just "pages" (a virtual memory function) and it is very smart about how and when it does it. Only dirty pages which are not write-mapped to a file in the filesystem need to go in the swap area, and only when the system runs short on RAM. Solaris is a quite-intensely memory-mapped system. The memory mapping allows a huge amount of sharing of shared library files, program text images, and unmodified pages shared after fork(). The end result is a very memory-efficient OS. Now if we could just get ZFS ARC and Gnome Desktop to not use any memory, we would be in nirvana. :-) Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
