From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 09:48:16 -0500 From: Dave McCracken Subject: Re: suspend processes at load (was Re: a simple OOM ...) Message-ID: <10520000.987778096@baldur> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Szabolcs Szakacsits Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: --On Friday, April 20, 2001 14:14:29 +0200 Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote: > What about the simplest case when one process thrasing? You suspend it > continuously from time to time so it won't finish e.g. in 10 minutes but > in 1 hour. Isn't one prcess thrashing sort of like one hand clapping? :) Seriously, the state we're talking about is when the running processes in the machine collectively want significantly more memory than is available, and none of them can make real progress. Suspending one or more of them for a few seconds will actually improve throughput and responsiveness of the entire system. As Rik has said, this has been in pretty much all flavors of Unix since the early days, and it has been proven to be effective. I'm not saying there aren't other things we can do with working set tracking that could help push out the point where the machine thrashes, but at some point all those mechanisms will be overwhelmed, and process suspension is a good last resort. Dave McCracken ====================================================================== Dave McCracken IBM Linux Base Kernel Team 1-512-838-3059 dmc@austin.ibm.com T/L 678-3059 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/