Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:53:40 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: VM in 2.4.7-pre hurts... |
| |
On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > Now, the fact that the system appears unusable does obviously mean that > > something is wrong. But you're barking up the wrong tree. > > Two more additional data points, > > 1) partially kernel-unrelated. MDK's "make" macro didn't support > alpha's /proc/cpuinfo output, "make -j$numprocs" became "make -j" and > fun ensued.
Ahh, well..
The kernel source code is set up to scale quite well, so yes a "make -j" will parallellise a bit teoo well for most machines, and you'll certainly run out of memory on just about anything (I routinely get load averages of 30+, and yes, you need at least half a GB of RAM for it to not be unpleasant - and probably more like a full gigabyte on an alpha).
So I definitely think the kernel likely did the right thing. It's not even clear that the OOM killer might not have been right - due to the 2.4.x swap space allocation, 256MB of swap-space is a bit tight on a 384MB machine that actually wants to use a lot of memory.
> 2) I agree that 200MB into swap and 200MB into cache isn't bad per se, > but when it triggers the OOM killer it is bad.
Note that it might easily have been 256MB into swap (ie it had eaten _all_ of your swap) at some stage - and you just didn't see it in the vmstat output because obviously at that point the machine was a bit loaded.
But neutering the OOM killer like Alan suggested may be a rather valid approach anyway. Delaying the killing sounds valid: if we're truly livelocked on the VM, we'll be calling down to the OOM killer so much that it's probably quite valid to say "only return 1 after X iterations".
Linus
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |