Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 4 Jan 2001 08:43:23 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: try_to_swap_out() return value problem? |
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On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Rik van Riel wrote: > > Then again, in theory the current VM should already be > unbalanced and we haven't felt any bad effects yet ;)
The current VM is in fact very nice - I spent quite a long time running with 32MB and for the first time in ages I didn't mind all that much. It was painful when doing a recursive kernel diff (which takes me 2 seconds with both threes cached, which they tend to be with a gig of RAM), but X was fine.
The way to really hurt the current VM is to have a process dirty working set that is large and changes rapidly. Then we'll do badly, apparently because we'll end up having a large portion of the freeable pages in the page tables, but we still seem to try to do most of the work in the lists.
I'd like somebody to try out a more aggressive "drop this from the page tables, but don't actively swap it out until needed" approach eventually. For now, 2.4.0 seems to be quite nice on "normal" loads, though.
(Or maybe my loads weren't normal, who knows)
Linus
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