exit(2) and swap

[RW]

On Fri, 27 Dec 2013 03:45:26 +0100
cpghost wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm wondering (again) how exit(2) and swap interact.
> 
> I have some process (rtin from ports/tin) taking a LONG
> time to exit, if it has a lot of pages swapped out.
> Looking at top(1), it seems as if that process tries to
> swap pages in again from disk, before shutting down.
> 
> Is it just rtin doing something funny before exiting,
> or is that a general problem with FreeBSD's exit(2)
> implementation? 

I think this commonly happens to some extent when a program shuts down
cleanly. Some pages need to be read at shut-down, often a lot of
destructors (or equivalent) get run that do a lot of gratuitous
cleaning-up.