> It would be interesting to know which processes were
> swapped in and out during these multi-second pauses.

Difficult to tell when the system is not responding to anything but ping. ;)

But _what_ is the system really _doing_ - it accesses the swap disk only
_once_ every second (roughly) and for a short period of time.  Most of the
time the disk sits completely idle.  This is what happens on my systems,
at least.  If the system was swapping like crazy, I would think the disk
LED would be constantly on and the drive would seek a lot.  This is not
what happens.

Could it be that the system is scanning its page lists or something and
only swapping a page every now and then?  If it just swapped out 1 MB,
it would only take a fraction of a second.. or one second at most,
probably.

  -jm

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