2.4.5 VM
Hi,
first of all, I am not complaining, or calling things buggy. I know
that what I am running is "work in progress" and that one gets what one deserves :-) 2.4.x has been stable for me and given me no severe problem besides the changed pcmcia/cardbus support somewhere in 2.4.4-acx
Just let me add my observation. The VM behaviour of 2.4.5 (started with
some 2.4.4-ac kernel) is definitely less than an improvement for *my* setup. I am running a Thinkpad570 with 128 MB memory and about the same amount of swap (I know, against reccomendation).
Under the new VM behaviour, I easily get in a situation where the
system feels very sluggish. At that point in time, about 70-80% of memory are Cache, the rest is Used and some small amount of free. Swap is usually less than half filled and paging activity is about zero (some sporadic page out). Typical case is a kernel build plus a Netscape session. No unusal behaviour showing up in "top" - just sluggish system response.
My gut feeling is that the Cache is pressing to hard against process
memory. This may be great for some setups, but it is not good for others (like mine).
What would be great (maybe someone is already working on it) are some
tuning measures to tweak the cacheing behaviour.
Just my 2 (Euro-)cents.
Martin
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------------------------------------------------------------------ Martin Knoblauch | email: [email protected] TeraPort GmbH | Phone: +49-89-510857-309 C+ITS | Fax: +49-89-510857-111 http://www.teraport.de | Mobile: +49-170-4904759
Quoted 2 lines
Just let me add my observation. The VM behaviour of 2.4.5 (started with
some 2.4.4-ac kernel) is definitely less than an improvement for *my*
2.4.5 and 2.4.4-ac are unrelated VM setups. 2.4.5-ac is probably much better for a lot of loads as it has the 2.4.5 general behaviour but gets the aging a lot more sane
Quoted 7 lines · Alan Cox
Quoted 3 lines
Just let me add my observation. The VM behaviour of 2.4.5 (started with
some 2.4.4-ac kernel) is definitely less than an improvement for *my*2.4.5 and 2.4.4-ac are unrelated VM setups. 2.4.5-ac is probably much better for a lot of loads as it has the 2.4.5 general behaviour but gets the aging a lot more sane
OK. Maybe my wording was implying a nonexisting relation. In any case,
the behaviour I described started with some of the later (-ac12) versions of 2.4.4-ac and continues with 2.4.5-ac.
On a side question: does Linux support swap-files in addition to
sawp-partitions? Even if that has a performance penalty, when the system is swapping performance is dead anyway.
Martin
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------------------------------------------------------------------ Martin Knoblauch | email: [email protected] TeraPort GmbH | Phone: +49-89-510857-309 C+ITS | Fax: +49-89-510857-111 http://www.teraport.de | Mobile: +49-170-4904759
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Quoted 2 lines
On a side question: does Linux support swap-files in addition to
sawp-partitions? Even if that has a performance penalty, when the system
since before 1.0 I believe 8)
Quoted 3 lines
On a side question: does Linux support swap-files in addition to sawp-partitions? Even if that has a performance penalty, when the system is swapping performance is dead anyway.
Yes. Simply use mkswap and swapon/off on a regular file instead of a partition device. I don't notice any significant performance penalty (a swapfile on a SCSI disk is faster than a swap-partition on an IDE disk), although you'd be advised to attempt to keep the file unfragmented.
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Quoted 3 lines
On a side question: does Linux support swap-files in addition to
sawp-partitions? Even if that has a performance penalty, when the system is swapping performance is dead anyway.
Yes.
A possible solution could be:
Quoted 3 lines
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=<whatever you like in MB> mkswap /swap
swapon /swap
Works fine for me.