From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261315AbULHTGu (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Dec 2004 14:06:50 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261318AbULHTGu (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Dec 2004 14:06:50 -0500 Received: from mail.tmr.com ([216.238.38.203]:34571 "EHLO gatekeeper.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261315AbULHTGo (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Dec 2004 14:06:44 -0500 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Path: not-for-mail From: Bill Davidsen Newsgroups: mail.linux-kernel Subject: Limiting program swap Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 14:07:36 -0500 Organization: TMR Associates, Inc Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: gatekeeper.tmr.com 1102532243 5367 192.168.12.100 (8 Dec 2004 18:57:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@tmr.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I have several machine of various memory sizes which suffer from really poor performance when doing backups. This appears to be because all the programs other than the backup quickly get swapped to make room for i/o buffers. Is there some standard portable way to prevent this, either by reserving some memory for programs which will not get swapped regardless of i/o pressure, or alternatively limiting the total memory used for i/o buffers, dcache, and similar things? I did a crude hack for 2.4.17, but if I'm missing some obvious trick I'd rather not do something which can't go in the mainline kernel. Anyone care to show me what I missed, or is this just a characteristic of Linux? -- -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me