Sudden grow of memory in "Laundry" state

[RW]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 17:30:42 -0800
Mark Millard wrote:

> On 2018-Nov-5, at 16:53, RW via freebsd-hackers <freebsd-hackers at
> freebsd.org> wrote:
> 

> >> Unfortunately, the wording of this message is a misnomer for what
> >> drives the kills: it is actually driven by being unable to gain
> >> more free memory but FreeBSD will not swap-out processes that stay
> >> runnable (or are running), only ones that are waiting.  
> > 
> > When you say it wont swap-out processes, do you mean that
> > literally, or do you mean it wont page-out from runable processes?
> > Swapping processes shouldn't be an essential part of recovering
> > memory, Linux doesn't even support it.  
> 
> Paging is a different issue as I understand. Without paging,
> no process could have a memory area bigger than RAM.

Modern VM manages memory at the page level, and paging replaced true
process swapping a long time ago. 

In FreeBSD a form of swapping was recreated on top of paging. Under low
memory conditions the recovery of memory from whole processes is
accelerated allowing more memory into the running/runable processes.
This is a relatively minor tweak to ordinary paging - AFAIK it shouldn't
prevent normal memory management at the page level.