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

Nick Piggin
2004-04-30T05:15:55Z

Horst von Brand wrote:
> Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> said:
>
> [...]
>
>
>>I don't know. What if you have some huge application that only
>>runs once per day for 10 minutes? Do you want it to be consuming
>>100MB of your memory for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes for
>>no good reason?
>
>
> How on earth is the kernel supposed to know that for this one particular
> job you don't care if it takes 3 hours instead of 10 minutes, just because
> you don't want to spare enough preciousss RAM?

It doesn't know that.

But if you restrict this guy's working set to a tiny amount
and just allow it to thrash away, then if nothing else, all
that wasted disk IO will slow all your other stuff down too.

However that is something we can allow you to tune, via RSS
limits. I am maintaining Rik's patch for that and will send
it on when rmap optimisation work is more finalised.