From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from max.fys.ruu.nl (max.fys.ruu.nl [131.211.32.73]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id FAA21806 for ; Tue, 24 Mar 1998 05:12:55 -0500 Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 10:48:39 +0100 (MET) From: Rik van Riel Reply-To: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: 2.1.90 dies with many procs procs, partial fix In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Finn Arne Gangstad , "Stephen C. Tweedie" , linux-mm List-ID: On Mon, 23 Mar 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Of course, this is with some changes to the kswapd logic that I had > anyway, so maybe they just behave really well, but I think the basic > problem is that I have too much RAM to really see any bad behaviour. > > Anyway, I'm appending the diffs as I have them in my current pre-91 mm > changes to let people comment on them.. I have some changes that do something like this (you've already seen them :-), but with a little different kswapd triggering. The difference between a thrashing swapout madness, and a harmless one seems to be the buffer_mem.min_percent, ie. the page cache has a minimum RSS, so swapping can continue without thrashing. This, combined with pagecache aging, makes sure there's no real thrashing going on. For example, yesterday evening my computer (24M) swapped out some 14M in one swoop ... x11amp didn't skip a beat! The hint that buffer_mem.min_percent is responsible for remaining responsiveness was kindly given to me by xmem... Rik. +-------------------------------------------+--------------------------+ | Linux: - LinuxHQ MM-patches page | Scouting webmaster | | - kswapd ask-him & complain-to guy | Vries cubscout leader | | http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~riel/ | | +-------------------------------------------+--------------------------+