I run a memory-hungry process (mkcromfs) which consumes more memory than I have physical memory on my latop, so it is paging and swappin and thrashing all the time and loadavg is about 2 (compcache is already in use with usual swap partition as well), but slowly moving forward (Although I afraid it will finally try to allocate >2GB and crash draining 2 days of thrashing).
When I want to use the laptop for something else, I stop the process, start X server, firefox and other programs. The problem is that when I start Firefox the loadavg jumps to 10 and the system becomes almost unresponsive at all (long time to turn on/off caps lock, slow mouse cursor position updates, slow switching from X server to Linux console, slow login).
The stopped mkcromfs still holds a lot of memory (464.8 MiB and slowly falling) and moves it to swap only when more memory is needed for some other program, which results in a great slowdown.
How to tell the Linux to swap out this process entirely (e.g. I'm not intending to resume it in short term), possibly waking from swap other data? Also it will be useful to be able to specify the exact swap device to swap the given process out (for example, mkcromfs's memory is useless in ramzswap).
Update: Now I just write a 400-600M of data from /dev/erandom to tmpfs and it makes mkcromfs to shrink. Is there more proper way?
Best Answer
You can try playing with sysctl "swappiness" parameter... IIRC the higher the value, the more "likely to swap" is. Take a look here