Re: Swappiness vs. mmap() and interactive response

Peter Zijlstra
2009-04-28T07:49:06Z

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 14:35 +0900, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:
> (cc to linux-mm and Rik)
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > So, I just set up Ubuntu Jaunty (using Linux 2.6.28) on a quad core phenom box,
> > and then I did the following (with XFS over LVM):
> >
> > mv /500gig/of/data/on/disk/one /disk/two
> >
> > This quickly caused the system to. grind.. to... a.... complete..... halt.
> > Basically every UI operation, including the mouse in Xorg, started experiencing
> > multiple second lag and delays. This made the system essentially unusable --
> > for example, just flipping to the window where the "mv" command was running
> > took 10 seconds on more than one occasion. Basically a "click and get coffee"
> > interface.
>
> I have some question and request.
>
> 1. please post your /proc/meminfo
> 2. Do above copy make tons swap-out? IOW your disk read much faster than write?
> 3. cache limitation of memcgroup solve this problem?
> 4. Which disk have your /bin and /usr/bin?
>

FWIW I fundamentally object to 3 as being a solution.

I still think the idea of read-ahead driven drop-behind is a good one,
alas last time we brought that up people thought differently.