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

Denis Vlasenko
2004-04-29T21:49:05Z

On Thursday 29 April 2004 03:50, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > I don't know. What if you have some huge application that only
> > runs once per day for 10 minutes? Do you want it to be consuming
> > 100MB of your memory for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes for
> > no good reason?
>
> I keep soffice open all the time. The box in question has 512mb of ram.
> This is one app, even though I use it infrequently, would prefer that it
> never be swapped out. Mainly when I want to use it, I *WANT* it now (ie
> not waiting for it to come back from swap)

I'm afraid a part of the problem is that there are apps which are
way too bloated. Fighting bloat is thankless and hard, so almost
everybody simply throws RAM at the problem. Well. Having thrown
lotsa RAM at the problem, it may feel 'better' until you realize you
need not only RAM but *also* disk bandwidth to move bloat from disk
to RAM and back.

Come on, lets admit it. Proper fix to 'I want OpenOffice to be
responsive' problem is to make it several times smaller.
Everything else is more or less a workaround.

It's a pity size optimizations are not too popular even
on lkml.

> This is just my oppinion. I personally feel that cache should use
> available memory, not already used memory (swapping apps out for more
> cache).
--
vda