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OpenOffice comes with a "pagein" utility.

Posted Jul 26, 2007 0:39 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: OpenOffice comes with a "pagein" utility. by dmarti
Parent article: Still waiting for swap prefetch

Interesting. It's doing something different, though: it's indiscriminately bringing in pages from the program's text area. I can't see how it could do anything about process anonymous pages which have been shoved into swap. Somebody who really wanted to enjoy their coffee hot would want to use both pagein (for text) and prefetch (for data) - and find some, currently unknown way to balance the two.

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IWFM

Posted Jul 26, 2007 16:13 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Subjectively, for me, running that shell function seems to get rid of the lag on alt-tab to Firefox, Gimp, or OpenOffice first thing in the morning.

What would be better, for a desktop system, would be a "goodnight" script that would run housekeeping tasks such as updatedb and logrotate, then page back in whatever the user had been working on, then suspend.

explicit pagein

Posted Jul 27, 2007 22:12 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

To avoid the manual step (either good morning or good night), I run this in a cron job every hour all day. It doesn't matter that the interactive programs get paged in uselessly several times during the night; even if done right in the middle of updatedb, they just get paged right out again and the cost is insignificant.

I also send messages through some response-time-critical daemons regularly, to "loosen them up." I.e. page in executables, anonymous pages, etc.