Messages in this thread | | | From | (Nick Holloway) | Subject | What would you count as available swap? | Date | 28 Apr 1996 09:55:17 +0100 |
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I'm just updating swapd (daemon to dynamically add/remove swap files to try and deal with peak VM usage) to deal with the new format /proc/meminfo, and this has lead me to think about what it should count as available VM.
The easy figures are "FreeMem:" and "FreeSwap:". These are definitely available for use as VM.
The previous version of swapd (for a 1.2 kernel) would also count "buffers" as being potential VM, since they could be discarded.
But, I don't feel that putting off adding another swap file would be a good idea, since this could lead to thrashing of the available memory, rather than allowing unused pages to be flushed to swap.
So, what do you think is a reasonable approximation to guestimating the amount of swap available is? I guess the question is swapd will use the following:
FreeVM = FreeMem + FreeSwap + ( Buffers + Cached ) * f
But what value should 'f' have? Is this 0, 0.5, or 1?
-- `O O' | Home: Nick.Holloway@alfie.demon.co.uk // ^ \\ | Work: Nick.Holloway@parallax.co.uk http://www.parallax.co.uk/~alfie/
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