[ Thanks to Joe for this link.
]
“Con Kolivas strikes again, this time with a patch that
regulates the VM subsystem’s ‘swappiness’ on-the-fly, depending on
the percent of RAM being used by applications (it does not take
disk cache into account). Con explained the effects of this
patch:“‘This has the effect of preventing applications from being
swapped out if the ram is filling up with cached data. Conversely,
if many applications are in ram the swappiness increases which
means the application currently in use gets to stay in physical ram
while other less used applications are swapped out.“‘For desktop enthusiasts this means if you are copying large
files around like ISO images or leave your machine unattended for a
while it will not swap out your applications. Conversely if the
machine has a lot of applications currently loaded it will give the
currently running applications preference and swap out the less
used ones…'”
Related Story:
Linus
Torvalds: Linux 2.5.43(Oct 16, 2002)