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Well known, yes -- simple solution, not yet :)). This problem has been kicking around in one form or another for *months*, and although partial solutions have made their way into more recent kernels, someone reports issues of this nature on a more or less daily basis. What is happening is that Linux sees nothing better to do with free memory, so it fills it up with data from I/O into the page cache. Then when something comes along that wants memory, the system goes into conniption fits trying to reclaim the memory from the page cache and give it to the process that wants it. There were a whole bunch of tuning parameters in the VM in 2.2 that got dropped in 2.4; maybe re-instating some of them and returning them to their rightful owner, the system administrator, would solve this problem once and for all. But for some reason, those who control Linux have decided that this is "a bug in the VM" and pursued fixes in code and the associated logic rather than give us sysadmins what I believe is rightfully ours. I request such tuning parameters at least once a week here, and get ignored. I'll keep asking until I know enough about the code to put them in myself, assuming no one has broken down and admitted that someone who's been performance tuning operating systems since 1974 just might know what he's talking about :)). Anyone else want to share my soapbox??? :)) -- M. Edward Borasky znmeb@borasky-research.net http://www.borasky-research.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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