Re: Limiting program swap

Jesper Juhl
2004-12-08T20:36:10Z

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> 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'm wondering if turning the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness knob would help,
but I'll honestly admit that I don't know.

--
Jesper Juhl