Can I force a swap?

[Russell J Fulton;ccc032u]

bh at sgi.com (Bent Hagemark) writes:

>In article <9104231733.AA08996 at tc3.chem.iastate.edu> atchity at tc3.chem.iastate.edu ("Gregory J. Atchity") writes:
>>
>>   Is there any way to force a job on 4D machine (running 3.3.1) to be swapped
>>out of memory?
>>
>>   It seems that my STOPped jobs still retain their memory, at the expense of
>>other programs that need it.  I'd like to run some memory hogs on PI's during
>>the day if the console is not in use, and then STOP them when someone logs on
>>the console.  But kill -STOP doesn't do what I want.
>>
[ signature deleted ]

[ ..... ]

>I can certainly see how this would be handy in your case.  May I
>suggest setting a low RSS limit on the memory hogs?  If there's no
>contention for free memory the hogging process will actually be
>fully resident, but when memory gets tight the pageout daemon will
>enforce the RSS limits on these processes first.

We use a batch system on a 4D/240 which STOPs jobs when the queue closes.
'ps' show these jobs holding significant amount of memory hours later even
when the system is doing a significant amout of paging. i.e. the pageout
deamon does not appear to touch these jobs. 

Should we alter the limits on these processes after they have been stopped 
to get the deamon to reclaim the memory? (And set them back before they are
restarted of course.)

Russell.
-- 
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
<rj_fulton at aukuni.ac.nz>