Patch to Memory Subsystem ... (Needed?)
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Quoted 3 lines · Karl J. Runge
Forgive my intrusion, I have been using Linux for about 5 years, and am a decent C programmer, but certainly not a kernel hacker (however, at least I am not afraid to at _look_ at the kernel code).
I guess that qualifies you as someone to pay decent attention to :)
[SNIP dual ppro/64M 128M swap half full is sluggish]
Quoted 1 line
Is this inescapable because I am that far into swap?
I don't know how much swap I/O is going on, but it certainly shouldn't be as bad as you describe.
I know my 72MB machine feels great when GIMP is 120 MB in swap and paging a lot (not thashing though).
OTOH, if the working set of your machine is larger than the amount of physical memory you have, I guess the machine will be thrashing...
Quoted 6 lines
I am looking to buy more RAM, but I still feel something is not right. I have used kernels 2.0.35, 2.1.88, 2.1.112, and now 2.1.127. Perhaps it was better in 2.0.x but I cannot be sure (that was some time ago). I would be willing to experiment with swap parameters my setup, perhaps via some sysctl interface to kswapd? Is there such a beast?
There is documentation in Documentation/sysctl/, but it is currently out of date because Linus is ignoring the patch I sent him.
Quoted 4 lines
I have noticed Solaris recently added something that distinguishes between file I/O and system I/O at:
http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/priority_paging.html
I'll check it out.
cheers,
Rik -- slowly getting used to dvorak kbd layout...
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Linux memory management tour guide. [email protected] | | Scouting Vries cubscout leader. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/ | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
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