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From: bh@sgi.com (Bent Hagemark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Can I force a swap?
Message-ID: <1991Apr24.184435.10259@fido.wpd.sgi.com>
Date: 24 Apr 91 18:44:35 GMT
References: <9104231733.AA08996@tc3.chem.iastate.edu>
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In article <9104231733.AA08996@tc3.chem.iastate.edu> atchity@tc3.chem.iastate.edu ("Gregory J. Atchity") writes:
>
>   Is there any way to force a job on 4D machine (running 3.3.1) to be swapped
>out of memory?
>
>   It seems that my STOPped jobs still retain their memory, at the expense of
>other programs that need it.  I'd like to run some memory hogs on PI's during
>the day if the console is not in use, and then STOP them when someone logs on
>the console.  But kill -STOP doesn't do what I want.
>
>   I've noticed the same thing on DecStation 5000's.  Is this inherent in unix?
>
>Greg Atchity                              Iowa State University
>atchity@tc2.chem.IaState.edU              Ames Laboratory - USDOE
>atchity%qchem1@alISUvax.bitnet            310 Wilhelm Hall
>(515) 294-2582                            Ames, IA 50011

All swapping (paging out) is done on demand.  There's no way to directly swap
a process out or to cause this just by sending a process a STOP signal (I
don't think the interactive csh user hitting a ^Z would appreciate this! :-).

I can certainly see how this would be handy in your case.  May I
suggest setting a low RSS limit on the memory hogs?  If there's no
contention for free memory the hogging process will actually be
fully resident, but when memory gets tight the pageout daemon will
enforce the RSS limits on these processes first.

Bent