Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:41:29 +1100 | From | Bron Gondwana <> | Subject | Re: mmap dirty limits on 32 bit kernels (Was: [BUG] New Kernel Bugs) |
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On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 04:13:18PM -0700, Daniel Phillips wrote: > On Thursday 15 November 2007 14:24, Rob Mueller wrote: > > > That's my personal opinion, and I realize that some of the > > > commercial vendors may care about their insane customers' > > > satisfaction, but I'm simply not interested in insane users. If > > > they have that much RAM (and bought it a few years ago when a > > > 64-bit CPU wasn't an option), they can't be poor. > > > > From our perspective, the main issue is that some of these machines > > we spent quite a bit of money on the big RAM (for it's day) + lots of > > 15k RPM SCSI drives + multi-year support contracts. They're highly IO > > bound, and barely use 10-20% of their old 2.4Ghz Prestonia Xeon CPUs. > > It's hard to justify junking those machines < 5 years. > > > > We have a couple of 6G machines and some 8G machines using PAE. On > > the whole, they actually have been working really well (hmmm, apart > > from the recent dirty pages issue + reiserfs data=journal leaks + > > inodes in lowmem limits) > > Junk everything except the 15K drives, you will be glad you did. Too > bad about those multi-year support contracts, hopefully you got a deal > on them.
Actually, the 15K drives are the bit we're getting the least use out of now, since we're moving everything to external SATA units that are more easily swapable.
> Prediction: after these dirty pages issues are gone, there will be more > dirty page issues because the notion of dirty page limit is > fundamentally broken. Your smartest recourse is to re-motherboard to a > place where the dirty page limit borkage does not hurt as much, and in > the process you will get a cheap hardware upgrade. Everybody will be > happy, the sun will come out, the birds will sing.
Or just keep running 2.6.16 where it's all been working quite fine thanks very much, or maintain a simple patch that rips all that out since we don't care too much about "fairness" - we only run a couple of things on that machine and they run fine.
Bron ( going to settle down and really test this stuff to make sure we have an acceptable "fix" for us then do it! ) - 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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