Linux paging and the Java JVM
I read something interesting recently when looking at BASE databases implemented on the JVM. The linux kernel will quite aggressively swap out pages from processes when they are not being used. This can conflict with the way that generational garbage collection works in the JVM: garbage collection in particular can cause a lot of page faulting. Here the heap will be scanned for objects to be freed, however linux may have already paged out that memory making collection more expensive.
Submitted by Andy Gavin on Thu, 2010-09-16 10:29