From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: by wa-out-1112.google.com with SMTP id m33so295422wag for ; Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:15:49 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:15:49 -0400 From: "Robert Deaton" Subject: Re: howto get a patch merged (WAS: Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23) In-Reply-To: <46A773EA.5030103@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <367a23780707250830i20a04a60n690e8da5630d39a9@mail.gmail.com> <46A773EA.5030103@gmail.com> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rene Herman Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, ck list , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On 7/25/07, Rene Herman wrote: > And there we go again -- off into blabber-land. Why does swap-prefetch help > updatedb? Or doesn't it? And if it doesn't, why should anyone trust anything > else someone who said it does says? I don't think anyone has ever argued that swap-prefetch directly helps the performance of updatedb in any way, however, I do recall people mentioning that updatedb, being a ram intensive task, will often cause things to be swapped out while it runs on say a nightly cronjob. If a person is not at their computer, updatedb will run, cause all their applications to be swapped out, finish its work, and exit, leaving all the other applications that would have otherwise been left in RAM for when the user returns to his/her computer in swap. Thus, when someone returns, you have to wait for all your applications to be swapped back in. Swap prefetch, on the other hand, would have kicked in shortly after updatedb finished, leaving the applications in swap for a speedy recovery when the person comes back to their computer. -- --Robert Deaton -- 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: email@kvack.org