Re: 2.4.20 rh9 thrashing unreasonably

[Marc-Christian Petersen <m.c.p@kernel.linux-systeme.com>]

On Sunday 27 June 2004 05:27, Dan Kegel wrote:

Hi Dan,

> I have a zippy little 2GHz Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM running
> 2.4.20 (as supplied by Red Hat 9) which
> normally builds gcc/glibc toolchains very quickly.   However,
> when I wrote a script to build 200 different combinations of gcc / glibc /
> target one after the other, deleting each one immediately after installing
> it, performance mysteriously drops after about the 40th iteration;
> the CPU is mostly idle, and the system is swapping like crazy.
> It's turning a several day job into a several week job :-(
> I see someone else reported a similar problem
> (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118397), and said
> adjusting a proc setting helped, but they didn't say which one :-(

echo 30 >/proc/sys/vm/inactive_clean_percent
echo 1 10 10 >/proc/sys/vm/pagecache

> Any suggestions on tuning the existing kernel before I pitch it?

use a non-RH kernel.

ciao, Marc