Does it actually work?

Posted Apr 14, 2025 10:31 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Does it actually work? by khim
Parent article: Three ways to rework the swap subsystem

IME, Windows does better at not paging out part of a process's working set in order to page something else that the process needs in, and as a consequence is better at getting useful work from a process when it starts to thrash. It then combines this with longer timeslices, so that once you're doing useful work, you get a longer time to finish it before you're swapped out.

to post comments

Does it actually work?

Posted Apr 14, 2025 10:52 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It definitely plays tricks with pushing processed to swap and back.

One way to experience “a last straw breaks the camel's back” performance issue, that plagues Linux, on Windows – is to overfill both memory and swap, too (may only do that with “permanent”, fixed size swap… that's not a default Windows setup)

When Windows may no longer “push out” some “victim” processes to swap then it starts behaving like Linux and, eventually, freezes, too.

But I have found out that adding more swap to Linux doesn't help: it may take 20 minutes to switch to a text console and then you can not login… even if there are plenty of swap left unused.