Re: Results: 2.2.0-pre5 vs arcavm10 vs arcavm9 vs arcavm7

Linus Torvalds
1999-01-07T17:37:16Z

On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Steve Bergman wrote:
>
> Here are my latest numbers. This is timing a complete kernel compile (make
> clean;make depend;make;make modules;make modules_install) in 16MB memory with
> netscape, kde, and various daemons running. I unknowningly had two more daemons
> running in the background this time than last so the numbers can't be compared
> directly with my last test (Which I think I only sent to Andrea). But all of
> these numbers are consistent with *each other*.
>
>
> kernel Time Maj pf Min pf Swaps
> ---------- ----- ------ ------ -----
> 2.2.0-pre5 18:19 522333 493803 27984
> arcavm10 19:57 556299 494163 12035
> arcavm9 19:55 553783 494444 12077
> arcavm7 18:39 538520 493287 11526

Don't look too closely at the "swaps" number - I think pre-5 just changed
accounting a bit. A lot of the "swaps" are really just dropping a virtual
mapping (that is later picked up again from the page cache or the swap
cache).

Basically, pre-5 uses the page cache and the swap cache more actively as a
"victim cache", and that inflates the "swaps" number simply due to the
accounting issues.

I guess I shouldn't count the simple "drop_pte" operation as a swap at
all, because it doesn't involve any IO.

Linus