From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from relay-1.seagha.com (relay-1.seagha.com [193.75.252.18]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id GAA10258 for ; Tue, 18 May 1999 06:18:46 -0400 Received: from alpha.antwerp.seagha.com ([10.200.1.6]) by relay-1.seagha.com with smtp id 10jgx2-0001ga-00 for linux-mm@kvack.org; Tue, 18 May 1999 12:18:20 +0200 Message-Id: <001501bea117$c0a2d850$2b01c80a@pc-kvo.antwerp.seagha.com> From: "Karl Vogel" Subject: Swapping out old pages Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 12:18:19 +0200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: I recently became interested in all this VM stuff, so I'm not what you would call an expert (more like a newbie), but when browsing through the 2.2 mm sources, the following questions popped into my mind: - why does the swap out algorithm select the task with the largest RSS to free pages. If I'm not mistaken, the age of a page isn't considered?! Why is that? Am I overlooking something? (doesn't this mean that if I start a new large process, it's pages immediately get swapped out even though there are other processes that haven't done anything in the past couple of hours) - wouldn't it be beneficial if there is a parameter that allows you to specify that after a certain age, a page is swapped out to make room for the buffer cache. (even if the system has plenty of ram left - the idea is that: if your system has alot of RAM, old/unused pages (e.g. init code from daemons etc) are never swapped out and take away ram that can be used for better things). -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm my@address' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/