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

Florin Andrei
2004-09-14T18:33:09Z

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 16:27, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org> wrote:

> > The change was not deliberate but there have been some other people report
> > significant changes in the swappiness behaviour as well (see archives). It
> > has usually been of the increased swapping variety lately. It has been
> > annoying enough to the bleeding edge desktop users for a swag of out-of-tree
> > hacks to start appearing (like mine).
>
> All of which is largely wasted effort.

>From a highly-theoretical, ivory-tower perspective, maybe; i am not the
one to pass judgement.
>From a realistic, "fix it 'cause it's performing worse than MSDOS
without a disk cache" perspective, definitely not true.

I've found a situation where the vanilla kernel has a behaviour that
makes no sense:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109237941331221&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109237959719868&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109238126314192&w=2

A patch by Con Kolivas fixed it:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109410526607990&w=2

I cannot offer more details, i have no time for experiments, i just need
a system that works. The vanilla kernel does not.

--
Florin Andrei