Blaginations

In my previous post I indicated that I didn’t quite know why the graph was so linear as I expected something to happen when pages had to be swapped more. I think I have an answer, the linux scheduler (a description) schedules threads for a certain time quantum. According to this question on a “random” webpage that quantum is about 100ms. A processor running at about 2.7 GHz, and a page size of 4 KB, has about 72,000 ticks to deal with a byte on a memory page if it is to finish the page in its quantum … that seems plenty. I.e., from this it seems that in swapping out, and then later swapping in a thread it is unlikely to need to same page; and the linearity really is thread administration overhead.