Hello,
some days ago some friends and me argued about a feature which seems not to be
included in current OSs but could improve useability mainly for desktop
computers.
The idea was about prefetching swapped out pages when some memory is free, the
CPU is idle and the I/O load is low.
So this should not 'cost' much but behave better on following situation:
(I think there are even more such situations, this one should just be an
example)
One is surfing the internet and having some browser windows opened. Now,
without closing the browser windows, he is playing some game which needs
pretty much memory so the browsers memory is getting swapped out. After
finishing gaming he's going to make some coffee and then surfing the internet
again.
But even if the computer was IDLE for a time and, as the game was closed
again, some memory is really FREE, the pages for the browser are swapped in
just when they are needed and not in advance.
With this feature there should be no performance decrease because only free
resources would be used, and if pages were swapped in but not be used, they
stay not dirty and so have not to be written to disk when they are swapped
out again. But the improvements should be obvious if simply the last swaped
out pages are swapped in again...
If somebody could give me a hint how to implement this I would try it. I hope
it will not be very difficult... ;-)
Thank you for reading and perhaps thinking about it...
Best regards
Thomas Schlichter
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 07 2003 - 22:00:30 EST