On Thursday 21 July 2011 21:08:49 Albert Hopkins did opine thusly: > > "When a linux machine hits swap, it does so very aggressively, > > there is nothing nice about it at all. The entire machine slows > > to a painstaking crawl for easily a minute at a time while the > > kernel writes pages out to disk, and disk is thousands of times > > slower than RAM. > > > > > > This is not entirely true. There's regular swapping and there is > "thrashing".
Yes, thrashing is the correct word for what I described. I very seldom see swapping happen as one expects swap to be used, it almost always becomes thrashing shortly thereafter, and we do monitor our machines closely at work. That's what I've observed and it's not a large data set so I could be completely wrong. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
