Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell

[Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk>]

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 17:35, Clay Haapala wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Bart Samwel uttered the following:
> > 
> > Thought experiment: what would happen when you set the hypothetical
> > cpu-nice and io-nice knobs very differently?
> > 
> Dunno why, but this talk of knobs makes me think of the "effects-mix"
> knob on my bass amp that controls how much effects-loop signal is
> mixed with the "dry" guitar signal.
> 
> Getting back to kernel talk, we have a "swappiness" knob, right?
> Should there be, or is there already, a way to dynamically vary the
> effect of swappiness [within a range], based on some monitored system
> characteristics such as keyboard/mouse (HID) input or some other
> identifiable profile?  Perhaps this is similar to nice/fairness logic
> in the process schedulers.

This kind of thing is exactly what has been avoided by using
interactivity boosts, and taking that into account in an "io-nice" value
as well should solve that. Other profiles might be interesting though.

Interactive tasks have a tendency to be interactive for a short while,
and then be noninteractive for a long time. I'm thinking that it might
be worthwhile to do something with that, i.e. to keep a bonus for "past
interactivity" on some pages based on the fact that they were originally
loaded by a still-existing process that was once/is marked as
interactive.

--Bart