In the last episode (Mar 15), cpghost said: > I've noticed that when a huge, partially or totally swapped out process > exits, there is a lot of disk activity going on, before the process truly > dies. This is not necessarily due to sync(2), because it also happens > with CPU bound processes that write very little output. > > Not sure what's really going on there, but apparently, the process reads > in pages from swap that have been paged out previously (according to > top(1)).
Are you sure this is actually in _exit, and not in a cleanup function executed by the application as it exits? If there is a large linked list, for example, and the author has decided to actually free the list before exiting instead of just letting it disappear when the process exits, each swapped-out page will have to be brought back in as the list is traversed. C++ programs may have destructors doing this behind the scenes. Best way to figure out what's going on is to attach to the program with gdb while it's swapping, and print a stack trace. Also, since you mentioned a "totally swapped out" process exiting, are you terminating it externally with kill -9? It may be writing a core dump, which will force the kernel to pull back swapped-out pages to write them to the core file. > Couldn't this be avoided and the paged out pages simply discarded > without reading them back in? Or do those pages contain necessary > data at this point (page directories etc.)? -- Dan Nelson dnel...@allantgroup.com _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"