Paging out sleepy processes?

I have a simple app that I run locally that allocates and randomly dirties a lot of memory all at once, with the intention of forcing Linux to swap out processes.

How possible/reasonable would it be to add a feature which will swap out processes that have been asleep for a long time?

IMHO this behavior would default to off, but can be enabled by specifying the age at which the system should attempt to swap out processes:

	# tell kernel to swap out processes which have been asleep
	# longer than N seconds
	echo 7200 > /proc/sys/vm/min_sleepy_swap

Is there a way to do this already?

Regards,

Jeff
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why do u want to force it out. in my opinion, mm need to swap some process out when the amount of physical
memory is under some limit.
MM will force it out if MM choose this process to swap out.if MM not choose it, that's to say free memory is
enough or some other processes should be swapped out.

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Processes will not get swapped out until memory pressure occurs. Thus, idle processes waste physical memory until this situation occurs. Physical memory is always a valuable commodity, and should IMHO be reclaimed whenever possible.

It makes even more sense to page out idle _pages_ instead of processes, but I don't know if it is even possible to determine how long a page has been idle, in terms of clock time.

Jeff
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