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Old 10th July 2008
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robbak robbak is offline
Real Name: Robert Backhaus
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: North Queensland, Australia
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Firstly , free physical memory is good for a system. It means that it does not have to free up memory if a process suddenly requires a large amount of memory. (The other side of the tale, "Free memory is wasted memory," is also true: the two maxims must be balanced.)

That swap may simply be pages of memory that are cached in swap - The data is both in swap and in physical RAM, so the space is there if the system needs it, and the data is there if the process needs it. Best of both worlds.

And what is the point of paging back in idle data? The process is not likely to require it any time soon, or it wouldn't have stayed paged out for the last hour. I'll only have to swap it back out again, and I'm lazy. Despite having a brain the size of a planet....
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