Memory, swap, and limits

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 09:50 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> The portion of a process' code that is to be executed must be in RAM,
> along with any data structures it may need (unless they're the
> un-mmap(2)d parts of files).  If there is inadequate contiguous space
> in RAM, idle processes will be swapped out to the swap space until
> there
> is sufficient contiguous RAM to load the required code and data
> structures for the process in question.

Why contiguous? Every modern system uses paged memory. Most systems
probably never swap entire processes in the normal run of things (i.e.
except when seriously overloaded), they just move pages in and out.

poc