Re: Paging out sleepy processes?

Jeff Garzik
1999-10-21T08:09:53Z

Wang Yong wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > How possible/reasonable would it be to add a feature which will swap out
> > processes that have been asleep for a long time?

> why do u want to force it out

Processes will not get swapped out until memory pressure occurs. Thus,
idle processes waste physical memory until this situation occurs.
Physical memory is always a valuable commodity, and should IMHO be
reclaimed whenever possible.

It makes even more sense to page out idle _pages_ instead of processes,
but I don't know if it is even possible to determine how long a page has
been idle, in terms of clock time.

Jeff