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

Tim Connors
2004-04-30T06:21:39Z

Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl> said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:01:11 -0400:
> 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?

Note that we are not talking about having insufficient memory. In my
case (2.4 kernel - ie, 2.6 with swapiness 0%) there is more than
enough memory to contain all my working set - it's only because cache
is too eager to claim memory that is otherwise in use that
non-optimalities occur.

--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
If I'd known computer science was going to be like this, I'd never have
given up being a rock 'n' roll star. -- G. Hirst