Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 3 Mar 2001 01:03:26 +0100 (CET) | From | Adrian Bunk <> | Subject | Re: VM balancing problems under 2.4.2-ac1 |
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On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On 23 Feb 2001, Adam Sampson wrote: > > > The VM balancing updates in the recent ac kernels seem to have caused > > some interesting performance problems on my desktop machine. I've got > > 160Mb of RAM, and 2.4.2-ac1 appears to be using excessively large > > amounts of it for buffers and cache while pushing stuff out to > > swap. This means that Mozilla, for instance, runs significantly worse > > than under 2.4.0, since bits of it are being swapped in and out. > > This is a known problem which I'll fix as soon as I have a > solution. > > The problem is that we still have no good way to balance > how much memory we take from the cache and how much memory > we take from processes.
I have the same problem Adam has: I'm running 3-5 applications on my computer. I have 64 MB of RAM and I use usually less than 50 MB. I have swap for the rare cases where I need more RAM than I have. But with 2.4.x-acyz kernels I do often have to wait several seconds after I switched to another running application before it's swapped in again because it seems this application was swapped out to cache some MP3 I surely won't listen to before the next reboot...
> This means that for some workloads we'll be evicting too > much cache while for other workloads we'll be evicting too > much process pages... > > If anybody as a good idea to make this code auto-balancing, > please let me know.
I have no idea for auto-balancing but another idea: It's one possibility to let the user choose when doing "make *config" what he wants:
- A VM optimized for servers that swaps out applications in favor of caching. or - A VM optimized for workstations that won't swap out applications in favor of caching.
I know that's not a perfect solution but it would make the situation much better.
> regards, > > Rik
cu Adrian
--
Nicht weil die Dinge schwierig sind wagen wir sie nicht, sondern weil wir sie nicht wagen sind sie schwierig.
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