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

Tim Connors
2004-04-29T01:42:57Z

"Brett E." <brettspamacct@fastclick.com> said on Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:49:43 -0700:
> Or how about "Use ALL the cache you want Mr. Kernel. But when I want
> more physical memory pages, just reap cache pages and only swap out when
> the cache is down to a certain size(configurable, say 100megs or
> something)."

Oh how dearly I would love that...

I have a huge app that operates on a large file (but both are a bit
smaller than available memory, by maybe a hundred or two megs - enough
for to keep the entire working set in RAM, anyway). I create these
large files over and over (on another host, so cache does absolutely
no good whatsoever, since we are streaming a read once), but don't
delete the old ones, so they all remain in cache. So when I close one
copy of the app, and open up a new one on a different file, when it
comes time to allocate those several hundred megs, it rather blows
away my mozilla or my X session(! -- since I need it to display the
results) or my window manager, and keeps growing that cache.

--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
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