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

William Lee Irwin III
2004-04-29T06:39:50Z

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 09:20:47PM -0700, Marc Singer wrote:
> Now, I just read a comment you or WLI made about the page cache
> use-once logic. I wonder if that's the real culprit? As I wrote to
> Andrew Morton, the kernel seems to be assigning an awful lot of value
> to page cache pages that are used once (or twice?). I know that it
> would be expensive to perform an HTG aging algorithm where the head of
> the LRU list is really LRU. Does your patch pursue this line of
> thought?

I don't recall ever having seen an actual pure LRU patch.

The physical scanning infrastructure should be enough to implement most
global replacement algorithms with. It's always good to compare
alternatives. Also, we should have an implementation of random
replacement just as a control case to verify we do better than random.

-- wli