From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 05:05:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: Kernel 2.6.8.1: swap storm of death - nr_requests > 1024 on swap partition In-Reply-To: <20040831172531.GA18184@logos.cnet> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Marcelo Tosatti Cc: Karl Vogel , Andrew Morton , karl.vogel@pandora.be, axboe@suse.de, wli@holomorphy.com, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 08:24:31PM +0200, Karl Vogel wrote: > > On Tuesday 31 August 2004 18:52, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > > I've seen extreme decreases in performance (interactivity) with hungry > > > memory apps with Rik's swap token code. > > > > Decrease?! > > Yep, its odd. Rik knows the exact reason. Yes, it appears that the swap token patch works great on systems where the workload consists of similar applications. If you have a desktop, the swap token makes switching between apps faster. If you have a server, the swap token helps increase throughput. However, if you have one app that needs more memory than the system has and the rest of the apps are all "friendly", then the swap token can help the system hog steal resources from the other processes. This needs to be fixed somehow, but I'm at a conference now so I don't think I'll get around to it this week ;) -- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan -- 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/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org