From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 7 Sep 2001 06:17:16 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 7 Sep 2001 06:17:06 -0400 Received: from hermine.idb.hist.no ([158.38.50.15]:16399 "HELO hermine.idb.hist.no") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Fri, 7 Sep 2001 06:16:50 -0400 Message-ID: <3B989E46.51C1E768@idb.hist.no> Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2001 12:15:34 +0200 From: Helge Hafting X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [no] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.10-pre4 i686) X-Accept-Language: no, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jonathan Lundell , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: page pre-swapping + moving it on cache-list In-Reply-To: <591984348.999786074@[10.132.112.53]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jonathan Lundell wrote: > The problem with thrashing, is it not, is that we're not making > forward progress because we're waiting for swap--that is to say, > thrashing *is* an idle state of sorts, and so might be an ideal > opportunity for gc methods that require heavy CPU involvement. It's > not as if there's anything better to do.... Note that trashing don't necessarily mean the cpu is free. It can be very busy: - deciding what to swap out next - queuing stuff up for io, merging long elevator queues - handling io operations, we don't all have busmastering devices somehow I don't think garbage collection runs will be that fun in a trashing situation. Don't these algorithms look all over your stack & heap for pointers? That will surely cause lots of io as all the apps memory is paged in so the gc algorithm may look at it. Helge Hafting