Re: How to get a sense of VM pressure

Rusty Russell
2008-07-27T06:43:31Z

On Saturday 26 July 2008 03:55:36 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> So I guess what I need is some measurement of "memory use" which is
> perhaps akin to a system-wide RSS; a measure of the number of pages
> being actively used, that if non-resident would cause a large amount of
> paging. If you shrink the domain down to that number of pages + some
> padding (x%?), then the system will run happily in a stable state. If
> that number increases, then the system will need new memory soon, to
> stop it from thrashing. And if that number goes way below the domain's
> actual memory allocation, then it has "too much" memory.

Like everyone, I've thought about this. The shrinker callbacks seem like a
candidate here; have you played with them at all?

Some dynamic tension between the shrinker callback and slow feed of pages to
the balloon seems like it should work...

Rusty.