Re: swapping and the value of /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

William Lee Irwin III
2004-09-06T22:38:08Z

On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 04:22:07PM -0500, Ray Bryant wrote:
> We were planning on suggesting that such users set swappiness=0 to give
> user pages priority over the page cache pages. But it doesn't look like
> that works very well in the more recent kernels.
> One (perhaps) desirable feature would be for intermediate values of
> swappiness to have behavior in between the two extremes (mapped pages have
> higher priority vs page cache pages having priority over unreferenced
> mapped pages),
> so that one would have finer grain control over the amount of swap used.
> I'm not sure how to achieve such a goal, however. :-)

Priority paging again? A perennial suggestion.

On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 04:22:07PM -0500, Ray Bryant wrote:
> On a separate issue, the response to my proposal for a mempolicy to control
> allocation of page cache pages has been <ahem> underwhelming.
> (See: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&m=109416852113561&w=2
> and http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&m=109416852416997&w=2 )
> I wonder if this is because I just posted it to linux-mm or its not fleshed
> out enough yet to be interesting?

It was very noncontroversial. Since it's apparently useful to someone
and generally low-impact it should probably be merged.

-- wli