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Unix VM
Authored by: sharumpe on Jun 04, '01 04:51:26PM

The editor's comment isn't strictly true. You can keep many programs open, and only incur massive paging hits when programs with large memory footprints are moved in or out of real memory. If the program being paged out to disk is using a lot of memory, then it takes a long time to page (relative to others). The same is true in reverse.

So, if you have lots of small programs open (small relative to physical memory), you don't get much paging when switching between them, even when you've exceeded 'real' memory.

It is more complicated than that, but that's pretty close. When you exceed your physical memory, it doesn't dump the whole contents of memory, just what it needs.



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Unix VM
Authored by: pascalpp on Jun 04, '01 08:16:46PM

...and I would imagine that paging a large application to or from disk would almost never take longer than it would currently take to relaunch said application after quitting it.



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Unix VM
Authored by: kon21 on Jun 05, '01 08:38:03PM

a good way to figure out if you are out of memory is to use the TOP command in the terminal. you will notice and area with 'x(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts' if you see the pageouts grow then you know you are using your hard drive for memory.



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