Not to mention that swapped pages get freed when modified in RAM IIRC. On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 06:07:23PM -0800, Raymond Jennings wrote: >> Just a two cent question, but is there any merit to having the kernel >> defragment swap space? > > That is a good question. > > Swap does fragment quite a bit, and there are several reasons for > that. > > We swap pages in our LRU list order, but this list is sorted by first > access, not by access frequency (not quite that cookie cutter, but the > ordering is certainly fairly coarse). This means that the pages may > already be in suboptimal order for swap in at the time of swap out. > > Once written to disk, the layout tends to stick. One reason is that > we actually try to not free swap slots unless there is a shortage of > swap space to save future swap out IO (grep for vm_swap_full()). The > other reason is that if a page shared among multiple threads is > swapped out, it can not be removed from swap until all threads have > faulted the page back in because of page table entries still referring > to the swap slot on disk. In a multi-threaded application, this is > rather unlikely. > > So even though the referencing order of the application might change, > the disk layout won't. But adjusting the disk layout speculatively > increases disk IO, so it could be hard to prove that you came up with > a net improvement. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>