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From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Limiting program swap
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 11:35:24 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20041208193524.GU2714@holomorphy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <cp7iqj$57n$1@gatekeeper.tmr.com>

On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 02:07:36PM -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> I have several machine of various memory sizes which suffer from really 
> poor performance when doing backups. This appears to be because all the 
> programs other than the backup quickly get swapped to make room for i/o 
> buffers.
> Is there some standard portable way to prevent this, either by reserving 
> some memory for programs which will not get swapped regardless of i/o 
> pressure, or alternatively limiting the total memory used for i/o 
> buffers, dcache, and similar things?
> I did a crude hack for 2.4.17, but if I'm missing some obvious trick I'd 
> rather not do something which can't go in the mainline kernel. Anyone 
> care to show me what I missed, or is this just a characteristic of Linux?

This appears at least superficially related to
/proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure in 2.6.x-mm (possibly also mainline)


-- wli

  parent reply	other threads:[~2004-12-08 19:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-12-08 19:07 Limiting program swap Bill Davidsen
2004-12-08 19:14 ` Marc-Christian Petersen
2004-12-08 19:35 ` William Lee Irwin III [this message]
2004-12-08 20:45 ` Jesper Juhl
2004-12-08 23:12   ` Con Kolivas

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