Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:34:52 +1000 | From | Nick Piggin <> | Subject | Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell |
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Tim Connors wrote: > Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl> said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:01:11 -0400: > >>Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> said: >> >>[...] >> >> >>>I don't know. What if you have some huge application that only >>>runs once per day for 10 minutes? Do you want it to be consuming >>>100MB of your memory for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes for >>>no good reason? >> >>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, just because >>you don't want to spare enough preciousss RAM? > > > Note that we are not talking about having insufficient memory. In my > case (2.4 kernel - ie, 2.6 with swapiness 0%) there is more than > enough memory to contain all my working set - it's only because cache > is too eager to claim memory that is otherwise in use that > non-optimalities occur. >
Well depends on what you mean by working set.
In our memory manager, there is a point where often used "file cache" (ie. unmapped cache) is considered preferable to unused or little used "application memory" (mapped memory).
There will be a point where even the most swap phobic desktop users will want to start swapping.
I missed the description of your exact problem... was it in this thread somewhere? Testing 2.6 would be appreciated if possible too. - 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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