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From
SubjectRe: 2.1.91 swap performance: jerky.
Date
Hello

I compiled 2.1.91 yesterday, but the swapping makes it close to
unusable for me. While it runs fine most of the time and even feels
more responsive than 2.1.88 most of the time, it periodically
decides to swap out everything it can. I've got only 32MB of RAM (64
more are coming soon :-) but not before mid April) but the kernel
often uses just 11-14 MB of it including buffers and cache.

Just before, there were about 26 MB used. I just stopped typing for a
few seconds and it started to swap out everything down to 11 MB
(according to xosview). I had to wait 2-3 minutes until it swapped the
stuff back in before I could continue. Here's a typical "free" output:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 31000 13076 17924 3812 980 3152
-/+ buffers/cache: 8944 22056
Swap: 65532 46724 18808

While it had 17MB free RAM, the system was basically running in the
swap partition and was unusable for minutes.

I made the mistake to get online last night and start ICQJava while
the machine was sorting in UUCP batches. The memory usage has gone
down to 11-12MB and the box locked up completely in about 2 minutes. I
wasn't even able to kill the X server using CTRL-ALT-Backspace. After
about 10 minutes of wild swapping I rebooted using SysRq.

I don't think this performance loss is worth just to keep X amount of
contiguous free memory. I prefer using the "swapout" hack when I need
it and be able to use my machine else.

Andi

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