Re: PATCH: Possible solution to VM problems (take 2)

Rik van Riel
2000-05-18T13:41:05Z

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Jan Niehusmann wrote:
> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 03:17:25AM -0700, Craig Kulesa wrote:
> > A stubborn problem that remains is the behavior when lots of
> > dirty pages pile up quickly. Doing a giant 'dd' from /dev/zero to a
> > file on disk still causes gaps of unresponsiveness. Here's a short vmstat
> > session on a 128 MB PIII system performing a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy.dat
> > bs=1024k count=256':
>
> While 'dd if=/dev/zero of=file' can, of course, generate dirty pages at
> an insane rate, I see the same unresponsiveness when doing cp -a from
> one filesystem to another. (and even from a slow harddisk to a faster one).

I think I have this mostly figured out. I'll work on
making some small improvements over Quintela's patch
that will make the system behave decently in this
situation too.

regards,

Rik
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