[Gllug] Memory usage when idle

[Nix]

On Wed, 5 May 2004, Daniel P. Berrange mused:
> The kernel will, however, quite happily swap out applications which are
> currently idle in order to increase the disk cache size.

Note that as the applications' text pages themselves *run* out of the
page (`disk') cache, this is quite a misleading thing to say.

What it might do is swap out dirty data pages from some applications
and discard text pages from some applications in order to free up space
to fill the page cache with, e.g., filesystem metadata required for an
updatedb or news expiry run.

-- 
`If you believe in strong AI, then death is no longer a mystery,
 but merely a lack of adequate backups.' --- Steven McDougall
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