Messages in this thread | | | From | Andrea Aime <> | Subject | How to tune vm to be less swap happy? | Date | Wed, 1 May 2002 12:02:38 +0000 |
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Hi everybody, sorry to bother you with this question, but I feel that current vm defaults are not tuned for a workstation use, but for a file server/db server use. I work on a couple of machines with 128MB of RAM, tipically use KDE 3.0 and Netbeans (a Java IDE). Ok, I use bloated software, I should have more RAM. Fine. But what I don't understand is why the system keeps swapping data in and out just because it doesn't want to shrink the cache below 40 MB. My typical memory occupation is:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 127096 123264 3832 0 1216 48164 -/+ buffers/cache: 73884 53212 Swap: 257000 62316 194684
Now, as you can see I would need 135 MB to keep all my programs in memory, and if you look at top output:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 4397 wolf 9 0 79196 71M 30472 S 0,0 57,4 0:00 java 4398 wolf 8 0 79196 71M 30472 S 0,0 57,4 0:00 java ...
you'll notice that due to the cache behaviour not even netbeans fits enterely in memory. I really doubt that I can benefit from a 48MB disk cache since the system is swapping in and out every time I open konqueror, kmail and the like... is there anything I can do to shrink the cache and to allow a bigger part of my working set to fit into memory? Moreover, what vm tuning do you advice for a typical workstation use with memory hungry applications? Best regards Andrea Aime
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