Re: VM Related question

[Tony Clarke]

>>I have noticed with my current kernel that after the system is idle for
>>a while, say 10 hours or
>>so, that everything seems to be swapped out to disk. So when I come in
>>the next morning
>>it starts swapping everything like crazy in from disk. Is this a known
>>characteristic of the
>>VM. I seem to remember this with all 2.4 kernels tried to date.
>>
>>Whats the point of swapping out to disk in circumstances like this?
>>
>>Currently I am using 2.4.18-rc2-ac2, with apps like mozilla, dozen
>>xterms, xemacs, staroffice etc.
>>
>
>The kernel makes no decision to swap just because you left the
>machine.  But your distro probably runs "updatedb" at night.
>Updatedb reads all the directories in all your filesystems, so
>it tends to use a lot of cache.  This activity pushes
>lots of other stuff into swap.
>
Yep. That makes sense. /proc/slabinfo looks like

inode_cache        60311  60312    512 8616 8616    1
dentry_cache       60301  63930    128 2131 2131    1
buffer_head        35115  40620    128 1348 1354    1

this is on a 256mb machine.

Would I be right in saying that the only way that memory gets reclaimed 
, is by some process requesting memory
or by some process waking up and having a load of page faults?

Cheers,
Tony.