Re: OOM kills if swappiness set to 0, swap storms otherwise

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon@widomaker.com>]

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 @ 19:59 -0800, Andrew Morton said:

> Much porkiness.
> 
> /proc/meminfo is very useful for obtaining a top-level view of where all
> the memory's gone to.  I'd tentatively say that your options are to put up
> with the swapping or find a new mail client.

I use mutt for my email, and I have the same issue on a 1GB system.

I really wish we could put an upper limit on what file cache can use.

I understand the original poster was running a lot of pork, but you
don't have to and still see a problem with swapping.  Even running KDE
my total application memory most of the time is 300MB or less on a
machine with 1GB of memory.

I shouldn't be suffering from swap storms.

For example, my normal working set of programs eats about 250MB of memory. If
I also start a job running to something like tag some mp3s, copy a CD, or just
process a lot of files, it only takes a few minutes before performance becomes
unacceptable.  

If you are doing some work where you switch among several applications
frequently, the pigginess of file cache becomes a serious problem.

Isn't that bad behavior by any measure?



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]