Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

C. Martins
2001-06-08T04:58:14Z

In my everyday desktop workstation (PII 350) I have 64MB of RAM and use 300MB of swap, 150MB on
each hard disk. After upgrading to 2.4, and maintaining the same set of applications (KDE, Netscape
& friends), the machine performance is _definitely_ much worse, in terms of responsiveness and
throughput. Most of applications just take much longer to load, and once you've made something
that required more memory for a while (like compiling a kernel, opening a large JPEG in gimp, etc)
it takes lots of time to come back to normal. Strangely, with 2.4 the workstation just feels that
someone stole the 64MB DIMM and put in a 16MB one!!
One thing I find strange is that with 2.4 if you run top or something similar you notice that
memory allocated for cache is almost always using more than half total RAM. I don't remember seeing
this with 2.2 kernel series...

Anyway I think there is something really broken with respect to 2.4 VM. It is just NOT acceptable
that when running the same set of apps and type of work and you upgrade your kernel, your hardware
no longer is up to the job, when it fited perfectly right before. This is just MS way of solving
problems here.

Best regards

Claudio Martins

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 06:58:39AM -0700, Gerhard Mack wrote:
>
> I have several boxes with 2x ram as swap and performance still sucks
> compared to 2.2.17.
>