Messages in this thread | | | From | (Alan Cox) | Subject | Re: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1 | Date | Mon, 5 Oct 1998 03:24:41 +0100 (BST) |
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> That's one thing I've always wondered about. Why not have the system > keep track of total memory instead of wanting to mirror memory onto > swap? It seems to me that if you have 512mb of core and 128mb of > swap that you've got 640mb of memory and you should be able to do > allocations against that, since either a page will be in core or > on the swap device.
Two reasons
1. Some (potentially quite a bit) of the memory is needed for kernel side resources - page tables, disk cache, kernel image, network buffers etc
2. Keeping pages both in memory and on swap is good. The swap cache massively reduces disk reads to memory.
Alan
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