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

Andrew Morton
2004-04-28T23:58:42Z

"Brett E." <brettspamacct@fastclick.com> wrote:
>
> I attached sar, slabinfo and /proc/meminfo data on the 2.6.5 machine. I
> reproduce this behavior by simply untarring a 260meg file on a
> production server, the machine becomes sluggish as it swaps to disk.

I see no swapout from the info which you sent.

A `vmstat 1' trace would be more useful.

> Is there a way to limit the cache so this machine, which has 1 gigabyte of
> memory, doesn't dip into swap?

Decrease /proc/sys/vm/swappiness?

Swapout is good. It frees up unused memory. I run my desktop machines at
swappiness=100.