Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:19:47 -0700 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell |
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Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> wrote: > > > How on earth is the kernel supposed to know that for this one particular > > job you don't care if it takes 3 hours instead of 10 minutes, > > I'd pay ten bucks (yeah, I'm a cheapskate) for an option that I could > twiddle that would mark my nightly updatedb and backup jobs as ones to > use reduced memory footprint (both for file caching and backing user > virtual address space), even if it took much longer. > > So, rather than protest in mock outrage that it's impossible for the > kernel to know this, instead answer the question as stated in all > seriousness ... well ... how _could_ the kernel know, and what _could_ > the kernel do if it knew. What mechanism(s) would be needed so that > the kernel could restrict a jobs memory usage?
Two things:
a) a knob to say "only reclaim pagecache". We have that now.
b) a knob to say "reclaim vfs caches harder". That's simply a matter of boosting the return value from shrink_dcache_memory() and perhaps shrink_icache_memory().
It's not quite what you're after, but it's close. - 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/
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