Re: How can we make page replacement smarter (was: swap-prefetch)

[Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>]

Al Boldi wrote:
> Chris Snook wrote:

>> At best, reads can be read-ahead and cached, which is why
>> sequential swap-in sucks less.  On-demand reads are as expensive as I/O
>> can get.
> 
> Which means that it should be at least as fast as swap-out, even faster 
> because write to disk is usually slower than read on modern disks.  But 
> linux currently shows a distinct 2x slowdown for sequential swap-in wrt 
> swap-out. 

That's because writes are faster than reads in moderate
quantities.

The disk caches writes, allowing the OS to write a whole
bunch of data into the disk cache and the disk can optimize
the IO a bit internally.

The same optimization is not possible for reads.

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