Actively used executable pages are explicitly excluded from reclaim. And if they are not used, why should they stay in memory when the memory is constrained? It is not the first time I have heard complaints about executable pages, but it seems to be some kind of common misunderstanding.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369516

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FooBarWidget 12 hours ago | parent [-]

What is "actively used"? The bash session that I was using 2 seconds before system grinded to a halt sure didn't count.

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fulafel 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The set of possibly blocking operations for interactively using bash is big. Executable pages of the bash executable are far from the only thing that could be missing.

If the machine is swap trashing, all i/o goes to the same congested queue. .bash_history read or write access, memory allocation, stuff your terminal program does, stuff your wayland compositor or X11 stack does, bash accessing data in its memory that has been swapped out, etc etc. And each of those could be waiting for a while to issue their IO request since the IO system is flooded by swap IO.

There should be a tool that can show the interdependent graph of pending, blocking io operations.

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man8alexd 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your bash session is most likely still in memory but the system is spending 99.9% of time waiting for swap I/O, trying to free a few pages of memory. Swap random access latency is 10^3 slower than RAM.

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FooBarWidget 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The system has swap disabled.

	▲	man8alexd 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Then see the link in my previous comment.