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

Andreas Hartmann
2001-12-28T20:17:40Z

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.

Regards,
Andreas Hartmann