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    SubjectRe: 2.1.91 swap performance: jerky.
    Date
    In article <351C2E91.5C23733D@pobox.com>, mlord  <mlord@pobox.com> wrote:
    >
    >Tried it. Less dramatic swings in swapping behaviour
    >than before, but still leaves more free memory than I'd
    >expect.. 4-5MB "free" at all times, despite continuous swapping.

    This is intentional. The background swapping tries to swap out enough
    stuff that we're never really low on memory (and that means that it
    tries to keep at least one 128kB _contiguous_ area free, for example -
    which in turn tends to indicate a few megs of real free memory).

    >(mind y'all, running four xboard's with "two machines" set
    >for each is a pretty heavy test of swapping..).

    xboard isn't exactly known for being light, no.

    >Either with or without, interactive response still "feels" okay,
    >considering the system load.

    Good. This is actually the major aim of the 2.1.90 code: to keep the
    system interactive "feel" the right way, by having a background swapout
    that is fairly aggressive but really stays in the background (and it is
    designed to be aggressive enough that it should hopefully never get to
    the state where the machine gets so tight on free memory that it starts
    to feel unresponsive).

    So yes, the numbers reported by "free" may be jerky, but I hope the
    machine itself doesn't actually _feel_ too jerky..

    Linus

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