On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 10:47:03PM -0700, Chuck Silvers wrote:
> what causes pages to be paged out is not that processes are dormant,
> it is that memory is low.  pages which have been used "recently" are
> not paged out but rather put back at the end of the list to consider.
> "recently" means "since the last time we checked to see if it was
> used recently".  this might be as short as a few seconds if we're
> churning through a lot of file data.  so processes which are "dormant"
> even for a few seconds are paged out, and the memory is reused for file
> data.  your suggestion describes what we do already.

I think this is the problem. We don't seem to make a difference between
recently-used pages for a file we are writing, and recently-used pages
by text or data process. When writing a large file I guess the most recently
used pages are the ones for the file's data, and the pagedaemon free pages of
programs instead. Maybe the pagedaemon should first free pages of file
data ?

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
--