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Subject2.3.4x MM tuning?
I noticed that on 2.3.41pre3, my system runs happily without ever hitting
swap (running Netscape, Star Office, many rxvts, many logged in consoles,
compiling things, etc.), on my SMP box with 128 MB RAM, but as soon as I
load linux-kernel in mutt, it seems to push about 1 MB out into swap,
even though there is ~50 MB in cache at the time. Is this expected
behavior, or does something need to be tuned here?

When there is enough memory free (unused), it won't swap out. It only
happens with all of the memory used by cache and programs, where it
should be able to free cache to load linux-kernel in mutt. My guess is
that because it is allocating memory as well as reading in a big file,
there is enough pressure to push things into swap unnecessarily. My
linux-kernel folder is currently about 42 MB. Once loaded, mutt takes
about 12 MB:

sim 5287 0.3 9.6 12744 12136 tty3 S 12:56 0:05 mutt

Once it starts using swap, I notice things slowing down (expectedly, but
it feels like a bit more than they should).

If I turn off swap and immediately try reloading mutt, all is fine...I
don't see any "gasp! choke! need memory!" messages coming from anywhere.

Simon-

[ Stormix Technologies Inc. ][ NetNation Communcations Inc. ]
[ sim@stormix.com ][ sim@netnation.com ]
[ Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employers. ]

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