Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 6 Sep 1998 09:58:59 +1200 | From | Chris Wedgwood <> | Subject | Re: memory management and the status of |
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On Sat, Sep 05, 1998 at 07:04:26PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> Doubtful indeed. Your choppy mp3 points to different problems. Free > memory is wasted memory.
This depends on how you define `free'.
Right now, it looks like free is defined as unallocated - I think it would be better defined as `unused' (although I can't tell you how to determine that, or how to define unused).
Migrating unused code and data pages from applications that have been running for a bit seems like a good idea to me, these pages are often touched when applications init, and then very infrequently (if every) again, so this RAM would be better used as buffer-cache.
With 256M of ram, I pretty much never hit swap unless I try really hard, however, when there has been a lot going on, I find there are many applications who have pages allocated not doing much with them.
Forcing these pages _out_ (over-commit & touch), and then letting things stabilise, does indeed seem to help disk performance with things like `make dep' and find blah, etc.
-Chris
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