Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Marc Singer wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 02:26:17PM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
>>Yes it includes something which should help that. Along with
>>the "split active lists" that I mentioned might help your
>>problem when WLI first came up with the change to the
>>swappiness calculation for your problem.
>>
>>It would be great if you had time to give my patch a run.
>>It hasn't been widely stress tested yet though, so no
>>production systems, of course!
> 
> 
> As I said, I'm game to have a go.  The trouble was that it doesn't
> apply.  My development kernel has an RMK patch applied that seems to
> conflict with the MM patch on which you depend.
> 

You would probably be better off trying a simpler change
first actually:

in mm/vmscan.c, shrink_list(), change:

if (res == WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE) {
	ClearPageReclaim(page);
	goto activate_locked;
}

to

if (res == WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE) {
	ClearPageReclaim(page);
	goto keep_locked;
}

I think it is not the correct solution, but should narrow
down your problem. Let us know how it goes.