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Date:      Sun, 05 Apr 1998 18:23:46 -0400
From:      Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz@druber.com>
To:        dyson@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        dg@root.com, dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: swap-leak in 2.2.5 ?
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19980405182346.00926c80@mail.kersur.net>
In-Reply-To: <199804052135.QAA00680@dyson.iquest.net>
References:  <3.0.5.32.19980405172640.00915e30@mail.kersur.net>

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At 04:35 PM 4/5/98 -0500, John S. Dyson wrote:
>Dan Swartzendruber said:
>> 
>> My only quibble with this technique is that it would seem to make it
>> harder to tell if your machine is really running low on swap or not
>> (e.g. swap as backing store for stack/heap/whatever *is* critical and
>> allocation failure can cause application failure, whereas swap being
>> used to cache random cruft is in the "who really cares" department).
>> Or is there some way to tell the difference?
>> 
>It is difficult not only to tell if you are low on swap, but also it
>is hard to quantify being low on memory.  I have been thinking about
>this over the last year or so.

Here's an off-the-cuff idea: since the confusing usage of swap as a
caching mechanism is only a performance optimization, how bogus would
it be to not report it.  Lie.  If my workstation has 64MB of swap set
up, 8 of which is being used for real backing store, and 12 of which
is being used to cache filesystem pages, have swapinfo lie and report
only 8MB in use.  Possibly add a flag to swapinfo to report both kinds
of usage (granted this makes it necessary for track what a given swap
block is used for, but...)




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