What happens when updatedb(1) runs? It does a `find /' and thus loads a lot of
fs related data into memory, which makes the kernel caches grow. But how
aggressive do these caches grow? Does this lead to any swapout because the
kernel likes it better to have some dentries and inodes in memory than
probably not-recently-used user pages?
If so, this would mean that a low-priority job like updatedb(1) makes pages
being swapped out that definitely have a higher priority. For updatedb and
similar things (largish ls -lR's) it would make sense to
load-and-quickly-forget all the inode and dentry cache stuff. Another
optimisation syscall, like madvise?
Stephan
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