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

David B. Stevens
2004-04-29T20:46:12Z

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?

Maybe the kernel should be told by the apps exactly what they require in
the way of memory and maybe how to slice up what the app gets for memory
from the kernel.

This would not be the first time that applications had to specify such
information.

That was what REGION= and other such parameters were all about in other
operating systems.

Then the kernel would have free use of what was left until the next app
started etc ....

Cheers,
Dave