Databases
StackOverflow2013
Postsdbo
PO
 

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals
  1. PO
    primarykey
    data
    text
    <blockquote> <p>If I have an inactive application that's using a ton of memory, why doesn't the kernel page its memory to disk AND leave another copy of that data in-memory?</p> </blockquote> <p>Lets say we did it. We wrote the page to disk, but left it in memory. A while later another process needs memory, so we want to kick out the page from the first process.</p> <p>We need to know with absolute certainty whether the first process has modified the page since it was written out to disk. If it has, we have to write it out again. The way we would track this is to take away the process's write permission to the page back when we first wrote it out to disk. If the process tries to write to the page again there will be a page fault. The kernel can note that the process has dirtied the page (and will therefore need to be written out again) before restoring the write permission and allowing the application to continue.</p> <p>Therein lies the problem. Taking away write permission from the page is actually somewhat expensive, particularly in multiprocessor machines. It is important that all CPUs purge their cache of page translations to make sure they take away the write permission.</p> <p>If the process does write to the page, taking a page fault is even more expensive. I'd presume that a non-trivial number of these pages would end up taking that fault, which eats into the gains we were looking for by leaving it in memory.</p> <p>So is it worth doing? I honestly don't know. I'm just trying to explain why leaving the page in memory isn't so obvious a win as it sounds.</p> <p>(*) This whole thing is very similar to a mechanism called Copy-On-Write, which is used when a process fork()s. The child process is very likely going to execute just a few instructions and call exec(), so it would be silly to copy all of the parents pages. Instead the write permission is taken away and the child simply allowed to run. Copy-On-Write is a win because the page fault is almost never taken: the child almost always calls exec() immediately.</p>
    singulars
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. POWhy do discussions of "swappiness" act like information can only be in one place at a time?
      singulars
      1. PTQuestion
    1. PTAnswer
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. USDGentry
    plurals
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
    1. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTUpMod
    2. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTUpMod
    3. VO
      singulars
      1. PO
      1. This table or related slice is empty.
      1. VTUpMod
    1. This table or related slice is empty.
 

Querying!

 
Guidance
A row detail

Detail views are divided into sections. All the information in the data section comes from columns in the selected row. The other sections display data from other, related rows.

Related data can be related in a to-one or a to-many fashion. Captions of data related in a to-many fashion link to a list view showing a filtered view of the table.

Try moving around until you find a non-empty to-many entry and click on the label to get to one. You can move back to the root by clicking on the database name in the header.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload