Re: Autotune swappiness01

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 08:47:39PM -0700, Joel Becker wrote:
> 	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.

I've had similar experiences except for the pauses. Could you identify
this as idle time, iowait, or cpu time (user/kernel)?

Also, does this behavior change at all as the IO scheduler varies? And
could you describe the system, e.g. IO devices/etc.?


-- wli