Re: 2.4.8preX VM problems

Marcelo Tosatti
2001-08-04T07:25:04Z

On Sat, 4 Aug 2001, Anton Blanchard wrote:

>
> Hi Marcelo,
>
> > The problem is pretty nasty: if there is no global shortage and only a
> > given zone with shortage, we set the zone free target to freepages.min
> > (basically no tasks can make progress with that amount of free memory).
>
> Paulus and I were seeing the same problem on a ppc with 2.4.8-pre3. We
> were doing cat > /dev/null of about 5G of data, when we had close to 3G of
> page cache kswapd chewed up all the cpu. Our guess was that there was a
> shortage of lowmem pages (everything above 512M is highmem on the ppc32
> kernel so there isnt much lowmem).
>
> The patch below allowed us to get close to 4G of page cache before
> things slowed down again and kswapd took over.

How much memory do you have on the box ?