Force swapping of certain stopped processes
When I'm playing minecraft, my computer often has to swap because Google Chrome takes much RAM, too. So, I'd like to manually swap out Google Chrome. I know that I can temporarily stop all its processes with SIGSTOP, but how can I force them into swap? Or is that a bad idea?
Maybe try a command like this to temporarily use a lot of memory to force Chrome (and everything else) to swap out before starting minecraft
dd if=/dev/zero conv=block cbs=1024m of=/dev/null bs=32m count=32
I wouldn't bother; other processes will be paged out automatically when there's memory pressure. The kernel uses a "least-recently-used" scheme for deciding what should be paged out next, and if you stop Chrome with SIGSTOP, it won't be able to use any of its pages, so after awhile they'll be kicked out of RAM if Minecraft needs more.