[ale] Swap Memory usage

[synco gibraldter]

On 19 Sep 2003 at 13:06, Greg Freemyer wrote:

> Are you sure it does?

> On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 12:32, David Corbin wrote:
> > Why does Linux use swap memory when there is RAM available?


greg is right -- it's designed to AVOID doing that... the only circumstance i can 
conceive that swap would be used over ram is this:  if you have 3MB of ram left and 
your program malloc's 5MB, the kernel may decide to put all 5MB is swap to keep it 
contiguous rather than putting 3MB in ram and then 2MB on the swap partition.  i 
could be completely wrong about that, but i could see that happening.  besides that, 
there is no reason that swap would take priority over ram except, as greg mentioned, 
once the "safe" threshold is surpassed.

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