VM improvement in -ac [was: "Cached" grows and grows and grows...]

Mike Fedyk
2001-09-08T00:54:03Z

On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 11:15:36PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > To tell you the honest truth: you are not alone in cosmos (with this problem)
> > ;-)
> > To give you that explicit hint for saving money: do not buy mem, it will be
> > eaten up by recent kernels without any performance gain or other positive
> > impact whatsoever.
>
> Pick up a 2.4.9-ac kernel, and you shouldnt be seeing the problem (I say
> shouldnt, I'm not 100% convinced its all under control)
>

I have to agree for the most part. My system used to use a lot of cache,
and swapped all of the time with 300+MBs of ram on a Linus 2.4 kernel, now with
-ac my swap is under 1kB with the same apps and load. I can even run ext3
now without another patch :).

One thing I have noticed is that I still see my system accessing the drive
softly for about 30 second time periods a few times a day. I didn't see
this on 2.2, and vmstat doesn't show any paging traffic, but it does show
about 48 avg pages/sec going out to the disk. I haven't really looked very
hard to find the culprit. Has anyone else noticed this?

[OT] Hmm, why isn't ext3 in the Linus kernel yet? It seems more mature than
reiserfs was when it was included back in 2.4.1...