lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2002]   [Jan]   [3]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [more markup]   [less markup]   [headers]   [forward]  
 
Messages in this thread
/
DateWed, 2 Jan 2002 21:54:49 -0800 (PST)
From"Jeffrey W. Baker" <>
SubjectRe: kswapd etc hogging machine

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Daniel Phillips wrote:

> On January 3, 2002 06:15 am, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > And we, the kernel developers, should hang our heads over this.  A
> > vendor-released, stable kernel is performing terribly with such a
> > simple workload.  One year after the release of 2.4.0!
>
> To be fair, in the year leading up to 2.4.0 much energy was expended on
> getting the bugs out of the unified and heaviliy threaded page+buffer
> cache[1], at the expense of work on the memory manager, so 2001 ended up
> being like a whole new kernel cycle.  Anyway, the saving grace is that 2.2
> managed to metamorphose from ugly duckling to... quite a nice duck, with
> almost all the features of 2.4 from the user's point of view.  So everybody
> has something to run.
>
> With 20 20 hindsight, the VM work could have been managed better but I don't
> see why anybody's head needs to be hung.  It was a bumpy road, we had to
> change a few tires, but we got to the other side of the mountain.

We did?  I'm running the last released kernel and today I got an OOM event
when 1.4 GB main memory was used for buffer cache.  I have to babysit any
Linux 2.4 machines that have interesting workloads.  2.4 may have reached
a local maximum, but the ascent to the peak is still in front of us.

-jwb

-
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/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 11:15    [W:0.394 / U:0.280 seconds]
©2003-2008 Jasper Spaans