: Agreed. This is one case where linux doesn't do anything clever at all,
: and one place where we should probably do some work. It happens for a lot
: of scientific calculations.
: The linux swapping code is really written for a more "interactive" load,
....
: Essentially, linux currently does a "interactive workstation" kind of
: approach to swapping, where accesses are more or less random. There it
: makes sense to use a global LRU-based swap-out algorithm.
....
: We should probably modify the LRU algorithm to take RSS into account (and
: possibly access patterns, although that is harder to do). However, to be
: quite honest, my personal priority is not that kind of behaviour, so it
: would be up to somebody else to implement this.. (hint hint)
Certainly, you are right. The only thing you forgot that science community
is major user of Linux for now (and maybe forever).
Performance/cost for Pentiums is so high, that scientists now started
fastly move to Pentium/Linux. It is not pleasent to discover
that Linux is not appropriate for them.
Alexey Kuznetsov.