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Andrew Morton authored
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness controls the VM's tendency to unmap pages and to swap things out. 100 -> basically current 2.5 behaviour 0 -> not very swappy at all The mechanism which is used to control swappiness is: to be reluctant to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. Prefer to reclaim pagecache instead. The control for that mechanism is as follows: - If there is a large amount of mapped memory in the machine, we prefer to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. - If page reclaim is under distress (more scanning is happening) then prefer to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. This is basically the 2.4 algorithm, really. - If the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness control is high then prefer to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. The implementation is simple: calculate the above three things as percentages and add them up. If that's over 100% then start reclaiming mapped pages. The `proportion of mapped memory' is downgraded so that we don't swap just because a lot of memory is mapped into pagetables - we still need some VM distress before starting to swap that memory out. For a while I was adding a little bias so that we prefer to unmap file-backed memory before swapping out anon memory. Because usually file backed memory can be evicted and reestablished with one I/O, not two. It was unmapping executable text too easily, so here I just treat them equally.
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