From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from digeo-nav01.digeo.com (digeo-nav01.digeo.com [192.168.1.233]) by packet.digeo.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA26850 for ; Sun, 15 Sep 2002 10:25:25 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <3D84C63E.76526EDE@digeo.com> Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 10:41:18 -0700 From: Andrew Morton MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: 2.5.34-mm4 References: <3D82B5C3.229C6B1A@digeo.com> <20020915105021.GA444@prester.freenet.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Axel Siebenwirth , Con Kolivas Cc: lkml , "linux-mm@kvack.org" , "lse-tech@lists.sourceforge.net" List-ID: Axel Siebenwirth wrote: > > Hi Andrew! > > On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > url: http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/2.5/2.5.34/2.5.34-mm4/ > > With changing from 2.5.34-mm2 to -mm4 I have experienced some moments of > quite unresponsive behaviour. For example I am building X which at that > special moment causes pretty heavy disk load and the system doesn't respond > at all. I was using X and was not able to switch consoles or move mouse only > extremely sluggish. There are large IDE updates in -mm4, and this is consistent with a disk which isn't doing DMA any more. Could you (and Con) please double-check with `hdparm -i' and `hdparm -t' that the disk subsystem is behaving properly? Yes, it could well be a VM bug, but I wouldn't want to run round in confused circles all day ;) Thanks. > I have seen that it used more swap that usual. 2.5 is much more swaphappy than 2.4. I believe that this is actually correct behaviour for optimum throughput. But it just happens that people (me included) hate it. We don't notice the improved runtimes for the pagecache-intensive operations but we do notice the time it takes to get the xterms working again. We have not yet sat down and worked out what to do about this. > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 191096 159340 31756 0 10568 94100 > -/+ buffers/cache: 54672 136424 > Swap: 289160 0 289160 > > This is how it looks like under normal circumstances and when building X I > had 20M in swap usage which seemed quite a lot to me. Maybe I'm just wrong. > Unfortunately I was not able to start vmstat, first because I can't start > vmstat when system is not responding and second it doesn't work anyway > because of your changes. > Yeah, sorry. The burden of back-compatibility weighed too heavy and Rik decided that we just have to fix userspace to follow kernel changes. There will be breakage for a while; updates are at http://surriel.com/procps/. Unfortunately, those updates cause odd-but-not-serious things to happen to Red Hat initscripts. This happens when you install standard util-linux as well. It is due to the initscripts passing in arguments which the standard tools do not understand. -- 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-mm.org/