Re: severe slowdown with 2.4 series w/heavy disk access

[Paul Boley <pboley@home.com>]

vda wrote:

> >
> >              total       used       free     shared    buffers
> > cached
> > Mem:        417472     412192       5280          0      20632
> > 315680
> > -/+ buffers/cache:      75880     341592
> > Swap:       136544          0     136544
> 
> It seems you think your memory is used for no purpose,
> but kernel just keeps page cache in your RAM (kernel bugs are indeed
> possible, but your test does not show any buggy behavior IMHO).

My whole system slows down (commands take a long time to execute,
decompression slows, ls in an empty dir takes 10 sec)

> 
> To verify this, you may repeat this experiment on a separate partition:
> 1) mount a partition
> 2) do the test as you described
> 3) umount the partition

I did this, and it uncached some, but I only had 60megs (out of 416)
free after unmounting the partition.  The cache went down to about 5
megs, and in-use was at 350 megs.

> 
> I believe you should see tons of free memory then, especially if your tarfile
> is also on that partition.
> Please report back if you would do the test.
> --
> vda