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Date:      Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:01:42 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Francisco Reyes <lists@natserv.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions List <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: When does swap decreases
Message-ID:  <20050621030141.GH8497@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <20050620225204.F41158@zoraida.natserv.net>
References:  <20050620141439.S36309@zoraida.natserv.net> <20050620182430.GE8497@dan.emsphone.com> <20050620144631.F37558@zoraida.natserv.net> <20050620185545.GF8497@dan.emsphone.com> <20050620225204.F41158@zoraida.natserv.net>

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In the last episode (Jun 20), Francisco Reyes said:
> On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > When the system is low on memory, it will force the least used
> > blocks of memory to swap.  It will not free the swap space until
> > the process owning them exits
> 
> Have not found any program to see what programs are using the swap,
> but as I think about it, the current method is not very "smart". I
> guess any other method is difficult to implement.
> 
> How wonder how the current method affects performance. Basically if
> there is a surge of memory usage and processes start that use the
> swap and these processes are long lived.. I wonder if performance
> will be affected.

There may even be a performance gain, since if the system comes under
memory pressure again, some of the in-memory pages of those long-lived
processes previously copied to swap may still be clean, and the system
won't even have to page them out; it can simply free the RAM.  I can't
think of any way for there to be a performance hit, unless you actually
run out of swap.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com



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