Re: swap files question.
Re: swap files question.
- Subject: Re: swap files question.
- From: Mike Smith <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 01:50:13 -0700
On Sep 8, 2004, at 10:00 PM, email@hidden
wrote:
I've wanted similar information in the past. In my case, I was
debugging what appeared to be a weird memory leak. The number of
swapfiles in /var/vm would grow to the hundreds, and eventually the
system would run out of drive space and crash. Even after killing off
all of our server processes we had a large number of files. It would
have been handy to figure out which processes had active blocks in the
swapfiles to know which process was the culprit.
This wouldn't tell you anything that you couldn't already tell by
looking at
the virtual size of running processes in the system.
It would have been useful if there were some sort of "reverse" vmmap
tool that would walk a swapfile and report the owner of each page
contained in it.
It would be less useful than you think; swapfile space is allocated on
an
as-needed basis, so for any process that has dirty pages in swap, you
can
reasonably assume that its pages are spread across all of the swapfiles
in
the system.
Note that the system will also move pages between swapfiles to compact
swap. This is a time-consuming process, and swapfiles will take a while
to disappear after they are no longer needed as the compaction process
tries not to impact the system's overall performance.
= Mike
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