Joydeep Sen Sarma wrote:
being paged out is sad - but the worst case is still no worse than killing the job (where all the data has to be *recomputed* back into memory on restart - not just swapped in from disk)
In my experience, once a large process is paged out it is almost always faster to restart it than to wait for it to get paged back in with random disk accesses. If there were a way to explicitly write out a process's working set, and then restore it later, using sequential disk accesses, that might be effective. Virtualization systems support such operations, so perhaps tasktrackers should start a Xen instance per task?
Doug
