* Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@...> wrote:

> > Is there anything userland apps could do to improve it ?
> > eg. memory pools based on usage patterns ?
> 
> sure, they can try to mlock themselves. But that is a nother bucket of 
> worms...

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of swapping ?

I was thinking about something different: trying to design
applications in a more swap-friendly way, eg. keeping data thats
used together in a relatively closed set of pages. Or separate
heavily used data from seldomly used ones.

For example, an web browser could use an own pool per window.
If some window is minimized, it shouldn't have to be repainted
(in theory ;-)), and everything belonging to it could potentially
be swapped out together, while other (active) windows dont need
data from these pages. OTOH closing an window would free the
whole pool - if it's an anonymous mmap()ed region, the kernel
could simply throw the pages away.


cu
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