Re: Autotune swappiness01

[Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 01:02:32PM +1000, Tim Connors wrote:
> I am not trying to say anything bad about your work - I am trying to
> caution Andrew that not everyone cares so much that they lose 200 megs of
> pagecache. It doesn't affect everyone equally - I'm just trying to put the
> voice of those of us who care more about responsiveness than throughput,
> if I may borrow the argument from upthread.

	I happen to be a person who rolls his eyes at everyone's mention
of micro-optimized "feel".  I've found that any system faster than
300MHz is pretty decent for normal desktop work (that is, moz + lots of
terminals in gnome/kde).  Yes, I'm a luddite, I used to wait 45 seconds
for moz to start in the morning on the 300Mhz.  I survived.
	In general, I can't notice the difference between 2.6.anything
on my 1GHz.  Maybe everyone else can, but I can't.
	HOWEVER, the swappiness of '60' puts my system into
fits-and-starts mode.  Not "It feels slower", but "It pauses for seconds
at a time."  So I chimed in on this.
	And yes, I'd give up oodles of pagecache to avoid fits and
starts.  But there's got to be a way to use the pagecache and not hang
for seconds at a time.

Joel

-- 

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to
 achieve immortality through not dying."
        - Woody Allen

Joel Becker
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Oracle Corporation
E-mail: joel.becker@oracle.com
Phone: (650) 506-8127