Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 23 Jan 1999 23:43:50 +0200 | From | Nimrod Zimerman <> | Subject | Re: Libs in memory response. |
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On Sat, Jan 23, 1999 at 01:03:21PM -0500, Mark H. Wood wrote:
> You can think of it this way. The kernel has two free-page lists: > one list of pages with nothing interesting in them, and another of > pages containing stuff that might become interesting and could be > just handed over without any I/O. Looking at it this way, you > want the second list to be large and the first to be small. And > that's what the kernel tries to give you.
However, in the latest kernels, the behavior of the cache is unacceptable on low-memory machines such as mine. The kernel actively caches WAY too much, preferring cache over real programs in main memory. This, I believe, is very much broken, and the performance of pre9 is far worse than 2.0 kernels in that respect. People with a lot of memory probably don't feel this at all.
Symptoms? While reading mail in mutt, and reading the disk in some other process, mutt just might be swapped out of memory, requiring a few seconds to come back to life when I want to read the next message. That isn't the Linux I'm used to...
Is there any chance that this will be fixed before 2.2.0, even if the fix only involves bringing 'pagecache' and 'buffermem' back to life? I hope.
Nimrod
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