Re: sched-idle and disk-priorities for 2.6.X

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

Hi!

> > I have some lingvistics application here that is pretty
> > demanding... it eats a lot of memory, overloads disk, and basically
> > makes system unusable for even as simple tasks as reading maillists.
> 
> > Where are lastest versions of disk-prio and sched-idle patches?
> 
> The most likely culprit here is "eats memory".  What's almost certainly
> happening is that your application is using a lot of pages, and leaving the
> system in thrashing mode.  Quite likely, "sched-idle" won't do what you want,
> as all that will happen is that the application will dirty pages while the CPU
> is otherwise idle (and cause the same problem you're seeing
> already).

Well, problem is that it takes long even to awake galeon after you
have not used it for few seconds. Disk is utilized by galeon at this
point, and disk-prio + sched-idle should guarantee that when I ask
system to do something, it will do it at max possible performance.

> A better bet would be a patch that allowed you to set the maximum RSS size for
> the process so it can basically thrash itself while leaving enough memory for
> everybody else (and yes, I *know* how this can be self-defeating if the
> thrashing app then increases the total I/O consumed to be higher than the I/O
> bandwidth available - the point is that it's probably the high RSS value for
> his application causing OTHER things to thrash that's the root cause of his
> performance problem).

Is there effective way to limit RSS?
									Pavel
-- 
When do you have a heart between your knees?
[Johanka's followup: and *two* hearts?]