Memory Page Scanning and Reclaim/Memory Management
 

If I have a system that is spending an appreciable amount of time scanning and reclaiming pages in memory, rather than paging out, would I expect to see that time classified as user time(since the page scanner is just a process), system time(since it could be seen as the kernel just taking care of itself), or wait time(since processes may be delayed while this is all going on)?

Where would I see this activity entered if I was running vmstat while all of this was going on?

Thanks.

Let me answer that obvious homework question in this way:

At any point in time, a computer system is doing one of three things:

1. CPU work executing the code of a user process.
2. CPU work not executing the code of a user process.
3. Nothing.

Homework Question #4: Given the above explanation, how would the operating system classify... etc. ?

-- Sorry for being so blunt, pal, but "college" is not a place where you spend lots of money asking other people to answer your questions for you.