Re: [2.4.17/18pre] VM and swap - it's really unusable

Andrea Arcangeli
2001-12-29T15:15:40Z

On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 09:16:38PM +0100, Andreas Hartmann wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Again, I did a rsync-operation as described in
> "[2.4.17rc1] Swapping" MID <3C1F4014.2010705@athlon.maya.org>.
>
> This time, the kernel had a swappartition which was about 200MB. As the
> swap-partition was fully used, the kernel killed all processes of knode.
> Nearly 50% of RAM had been used for buffers at this moment. Why is there
> so much memory used for buffers?
>
> I know I repeat it, but please:
>
> Fix the VM-management in kernel 2.4.x. It's unusable. Believe
> me! As comparison: kernel 2.2.19 didn't need nearly any swap for
> the same operation!
>
> Please consider that I'm using 512 MB of RAM. This should, or better:
> must be enough to do the rsync-operation nearly without any swapping -
> kernel 2.2.19 does it!
>
> The performance of kernel 2.4.18pre1 is very poor, which is no surprise,
> because the machine swaps nearly nonstop.

please try to reproduce on 2.4.17rc2aa2, thanks.

ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.4/2.4.17rc2aa2.bz2

Andrea