From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 20:34:24 -0300 (BRT) From: Marcelo Tosatti Subject: Re: VM Report was:Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org Cc: Shane Nay List-ID: First report of better interactivity under high VM loads with the vm-mt patch against 2.4.6-pre1. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 17:41:47 -0700 From: Shane Nay To: Marcelo Tosatti Subject: Re: VM Report was:Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps > > Could you please try > http://bazar.conectiva.com.br/~marcelo/patches/v2.4/2.4.6pre1/2.4.6pre1-vm- >mt.patch and tell me if interactivity gets better? > > Thanks a lot! Okay, I tried 2.4.6pre1 plus the patch that you point to here. Good and bad news. The bad news is I couldn't replicate my normal working enviroment because the NVidia module blew up on insertion into the kernel. (I think some symbol mangling thing..., not sure, didn't look at too too closely) Anyway, so what I did instead was run my contrived tests in console mode under both different versions several times. And here is where the good news comes in. Yes, the 2.4.6pre1 plus the patch you sent does make the machine much more "interactive" during high memory pressure/VM stress. What happened a couple times with 2.4.5 was that it literally hung half way through trying to run the shell util free for a quite noticable amount of time, delaying keyboard output to screen during that period at the console. I repeated the tests under the same precise conditions with 2.4.6pre1 but could not get it to exhibit the same broken behaviour. The only thing that bugged me about 2.4.6pre1 + your patch's VM is that it makes pretty broken choices as to what to OOM kill..., but I realize this is a point of great controversy. (It killed identd with great frequency for some reason) Anyway, the same is true of 2.4.5, it made what looked like the same choices. (But I didn't write that information down) It was quite happy with minimizing the cache, which 2.4.5 under console did as well. But 2.4.5s minimizing of the cache seemed to be what sort of started the slow down of interactivity. Thank You, Shane Nay. -- 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/