Re: Does Memory have to get swapped in to be freed?

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:48:05AM +0200, Martin S. Weber wrote:
> Hoi,
>    Just an observation after killing an ages old firefox with
> a good count of plugins having run. I look at my xosview and
> watch disk activity for quite a period, with rising memory
> usage. Then at a sudden the disk activity stops, all the
> memory (obviously used by firefox) is freed and memory
> usage drops quite, while finally the ffox window closes.
>    What is kind of strange is the time of disk activity
> which kind of goes around the system and ties it up while
> swapping in. Just to free the pages swapped out? Isn't it
> possible to free those pages just on the swap, without
> reading them in? Or was I witnessing something absolutely
> different?

firefox probably has a signal handler which is called when killed,
and this handler is doing a lot of things (like closing the
windows, flushing and closing files, etc), and all pages needed for
this are likely to have been paged out.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--