Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, A Darren Dunham wrote: >> I think these paragraphs are referring to two different concepts with >> "swap". Swapfiles or backing store in the first, and virtual memory >> space in the second. > > The "swap" area is mis-named since Solaris never "swaps". Some older > operating systems would put an entire program in the swap area when > the system ran short on memory and would have to "swap" between > programs. Solaris just "pages" (a virtual memory function) and it is > very smart about how and when it does it. Only dirty pages which are > not write-mapped to a file in the filesystem need to go in the swap > area, and only when the system runs short on RAM.
that's true most of the time ... unless free memory gets *really* low, then Solaris *does* start to swap (ie page out pages by process). IIRC, the threshold for swapping is minfree (measured in pages), and the value that needs to fall below this threshold is freemem. HTH Michael -- Michael Schuster http://blogs.sun.com/recursion Recursion, n.: see 'Recursion' _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
