Re: [2.1.130-3] Page cache DEFINATELY too persistant... feature?

Eric W. Biederman
1998-11-27T12:05:37Z

>>>>> "ST" == Stephen C Tweedie <sct@redhat.com> writes:

ST> Hi,
ST> Looks like I have a handle on what's wrong with the 2.1.130 vm (in
ST> particular, its tendency to cache too much at the expense of
ST> swapping).

I really should look and play with this but I have one question.

Why does it make sense when we want memory, to write every page
we can to swap before we free any memory?

I can't see how the policy of staying on a particular method of freeing pages
will hurt in the other cases where if we say we freed a page we actually did,
but in the current swap-out case it worries me.

Would a limit on a number of pages to try to write-to swap before we start trying to reclaim
pages be reasonable?

Eric