Re: swapout selection change in pre1

Ed Tomlinson
2001-01-15T01:22:27Z

On Saturday 13 January 2001 03:05, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > The swapout selection change in pre1 will make the kernel swapout
> > behavior not fair anymore to tasks which are sharing the VM (vfork()).
> >
> > I dont see any clean fix for that problem. Do you?
>
> What?
>
> It's the other way around: it used to be _extremely_ unfair towards
> threads, because threads woul dget swapped out _much_ more that
> non-threads. The new "count only nr of mm's" actually fixes a real problem
> in this area: a process with hundreds of threads would just get swapped
> out _way_ too quickly (it used to be counted as "hundreds of VM's", even
> though it's obviously just one VM, and should be swapped out as such).

Think its gone too far in the other direction now. Running a heavily
threaded java program, 35 threads and RSS of 44M a 128M KIII-400 with cpu
usage of 4-10%, the rest of the system is getting paged out very quickly and
X feels slugish. While we may not want to treat each thread as if it was a
process, I think we need more than one scan per group of threads sharing
memory.

Ideas?
Ed Tomlinson