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VM behaviour under 2.4.5-ac21

DISCUSSION Martin Knoblauch 3 participants 3 messages Jun 29, 2001 – Jun 30, 2001

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Hi,

just something positive for the weekend. With 2.4.5-ac21, the behaviour
on my laptop (128MB plus twice the sapw) seems a bit more sane. When I start new large applications now, the "used" portion of VM actually pushes against the cache instead of forcing stuff into swap. It is still using swap, but the effects on interactivity are much lighter.

So, if this is a preview of 2.4.6 bahaviour, there may be a light at
the end of the tunnel.

Have a good weekend
Martin

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Martin Knoblauch         |    email:  [email protected]
TeraPort GmbH            |    Phone:  +49-89-510857-309
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#1 lore raw
Quoted 8 lines · On 20010629 Martin Knoblauch wrote:

Hi,

just something positive for the weekend. With 2.4.5-ac21, the behaviour on my laptop (128MB plus twice the sapw) seems a bit more sane. When I start new large applications now, the "used" portion of VM actually pushes against the cache instead of forcing stuff into swap. It is still using swap, but the effects on interactivity are much lighter.

I was just going to say the same. After ac20, I think, the kernel stopped pre-allocating swap.
Before I had always some swap used even if I was only using half my core memory (256Mb). And growing. I have not seen the box touch the swap since ac20. It uses all the ram it can get for cache, but does not send anything to swap to use its ram for cache.
Now running ac21 while building ac22, and state is:

werewolf:/usr/src# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255588     241044      14544       2168       8836     153752
-/+ buffers/cache:      78456     177132
Swap:       152576          0     152576
werewolf:/usr/src# vmstat
   procs                      memory    swap          io     system         cpu
 r  b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache  si  so    bi    bo   in    cs  us  sy  id
 1  0  0      0   6944   8836 153868   0   0    16    12   95   385  17   3  80
Signature · 4 lines
J.A. Magallon                           #  Let the source be with you...        
mailto:[email protected]
Mandrake Linux release 8.1 (Cooker) for i586
Linux werewolf 2.4.5-ac21 #1 SMP Fri Jun 29 16:02:22 CEST 2001 i686
#2 lore raw
Quoted 18 lines · J . A . Magallon
Quoted 8 lines · On 20010629 Martin Knoblauch wrote:

Hi,

just something positive for the weekend. With 2.4.5-ac21, the behaviour on my laptop (128MB plus twice the sapw) seems a bit more sane. When I start new large applications now, the "used" portion of VM actually pushes against the cache instead of forcing stuff into swap. It is still using swap, but the effects on interactivity are much lighter.

I was just going to say the same. After ac20, I think, the kernel stopped pre-allocating swap.
Before I had always some swap used even if I was only using half my core memory (256Mb). And growing. I have not seen the box touch the swap since ac20. It uses all the ram it can get for cache, but does not send anything to swap to use its ram for cache.
Now running ac21 while building ac22, and state is:

Quoted 10 lines
werewolf:/usr/src# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255588     241044      14544       2168       8836     153752
-/+ buffers/cache:      78456     177132
Swap:       152576          0     152576
werewolf:/usr/src# vmstat
   procs                      memory    swap          io     system         cpu
 r  b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache  si  so    bi    bo   in    cs  us  sy  id
 1  0  0      0   6944   8836 153868   0   0    16    12   95   385  17   3  80

Weird: there is no VM change between ac20 and 21.