Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 May 1998 12:40:33 +0200 (CEST) | From | Andrea Arcangeli <> | Subject | 2.1.103 cache size still too big |
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The only way to read with Pine linux-kernel at the end of the month without wait for ages on my 32Mbye machine on 2.1.103 is setting:
root@dragon:/proc/sys/vm# cat pagecache 0 1 75
If I leave pagecache sysctl as default (15 ... 75 if I remember well) performance drop since Pine got swapped out while is reading linux-kernel folder.
Setting to 1 or to 0 the % of the memory that must be used for the cache helps a lot, but sure something is still broken since the system at beast leave 8Mbyte of memory in the cache while Pine opens _one_ linux-kernel folder (this `free` is been run after a while so it appears of only 6Mbyte):
root@dragon:/proc/sys/vm# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 31100 30444 656 8436 980 6884 -/+ buffers/cache: 22580 8520 Swap: 52412 8752 43660
Note also that buffers are _always_ 980Kbyte.
If I leave pagecache as default and I open linux-kernel these days (two day before start with an new empty folder) I get ~20Mbyte memory used by the cache, ~20Mbyte swapped out and 8Mbyte of memory used to run software, then ton of pagefault stall the system.
If I start _two_ Pine and open _two_ linux-kernel folder at the same time, with pagecache set to 0 as first field (the only way to do it I think ;-), the cache got reduced to 4 Mbyte (and 20Mbyte got swapped out) so sure it' s not a problem of used unfreeable kernel structures since the more I open things the more the cache got reduced.
Note also that 15 xx 75 got reasonable as default setting since 15% of 32Mbyte are 4Mbyte and I like this value when the system is low of memory.
Usually I don' t run application that uses large files except Pine...
I hope somebody will fix cache memory management before 2.2. I don' t bother about cache speed, I bother about use the system.
Andrea[s] Arcangeli
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