From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 31 May 2001 15:29:20 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 31 May 2001 15:29:10 -0400 Received: from mail2.netcabo.pt ([212.113.161.137]:47372 "EHLO netcabo.pt") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 31 May 2001 15:28:58 -0400 Message-ID: <3B169C06.1010507@europe.com> Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 20:31:18 +0100 From: Vasco Figueira User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.5 i686; en-US; rv:0.9+) Gecko/20010530 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel Subject: Re: [PATCH] reclaim dirty dead swapcache pages In-Reply-To: <3B168B59.70906@europe.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi again, Vasco Figueira wrote: >I've opened x, gnome, mozilla, mozilla -mail, 3 gnome-terminals, pan, >xmms, some files and javac. Swap was totally filled up and it didn't >froze (good!). However suddently it came very busy (i thougth it was >going to freeze again), the music stopped, and came back to normal >again. It had killed xmms, I noticed after. >Is it intentional to kill processes? Well, it does reolve the problem, >but kills some processes, probably the most eager ones. I will keep >using this patch and report again if something relevant is found. >So far, so good, this is better tha having to swapoff & swapon all the >time. Nice work Marcelo. Continuing the saga of testing this patch, some more things: * Swap gets *really* filled up. I don't remember having swap totally filled with 2.2. and this has 20M more (doesn't have to do with this patch, I think) * kernel appears to try to free pages only when they are desperatly needed, i.e., when swap is full and a big process is needing mem. As an example, i was calm editing some text files (swap was full), and called javac. System went down to his knees, music stopped, mouse had repent stops and javac outputed:"Killed". I assume it was killed :-) javac was called again and then ran more smootly. Perhaps because his pages were already there, no? It may be better to try to free pages before we get into heavy load. If not, we get a pseudo-freeze and a killed process. Wich is not... wonderful. Comments? -- Regards, Vasco Figueira http://students.fct.unl.pt/users/vaf12086/