From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from ns.weiden.de (ns.weiden.de [193.203.186.3]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id CAA09590 for ; Tue, 3 Mar 1998 02:16:28 -0500 Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 08:16:08 +0100 (MET) From: "Michael L. Galbraith" Subject: Re: [PATCH] kswapd fix & logic improvement In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Rik van Riel Cc: linux-mm , linux-kernel List-ID: On Tue, 3 Mar 1998, Rik van Riel wrote: > Hi there, > > here's the final patch to improve kswapd behaviour > and improve the performance of the readahead code. > > It was diffed against 2.1.89pre2, but since the VM > code hasn't changed up to pre5, it can be applied > easily. > > I'm currently running a kernel with those changes, > and it works better than before. > Hello Rik, I was able to stimulate a 'swap-attack' which took almost a hour to recover control from. Started X+KDE in 32bpp + some toys. Started 5 instances of Xboard in two machine mode. This + toys took the machine up to a working set of 180+ MB on a 80 MB machine. It was swapping like mad (better be) but all tasks were progressing nicely. I let the xboards run until the games were mostly over, and reset them to keep the pressure as high as possible. After about an hour and a half of this, I started a find on a drive with 1.5G of 'stuff'. The find ran nicely, but after it finished, cpu usage dropped to almost zilch. The machine ended up doing almost nothing but swapping and became useless and nearly unaccessable. After (finally) managing to terminate a couple of processes and dropping the working set to ~120MB, the xboards began to run again and cpu usage snapped back to normal (pegged). As I was composing this message (machine idle until updatedb started), a slew of .. 'kswapd: failed, got xxx of 160' came flying across the screen. Examining my logs, I find that there are about 10000 lines of these messages beginning with .. Mar 3 05:24:24 mikeg kernel: kswapd: failed, got 134 of 160 (beginning of heavy swapping) and ending with Mar 3 07:49:48 mikeg kernel: kswapd: failed, got 97 of 160 2.1.89pre5 + swap patch -Mike