Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 13:02:15 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 13:01:27 -0400 Received: from dsl-213-023-043-077.arcor-ip.net ([213.23.43.77]:16028 "EHLO starship") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 12:58:04 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Daniel Phillips To: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: qsbench, interesting results Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 19:03:40 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3.2] Cc: Andrew Morton , Lorenzo Allegrucci , Linux Kernel References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Message-Id: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 3119 Lines: 74 On Tuesday 01 October 2002 18:52, Rik van Riel wrote: > On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Daniel Phillips wrote: > > On Monday 30 September 2002 07:57, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > I'll take a look at some preferential throttling later on. But > > > I must say that I'm not hugely worried about performance regression > > > under wild swapstorms. The correct fix is to go buy some more > > > RAM, and the kernel should not be trying to cater for underprovisioned > > > machines if that affects the usual case. > > > > The operative phrase here is "if that affects the usual case". > > Actually, the quicksort bench is not that bad a model of a usual case, > > i.e., a working set 50% bigger than RAM. > > Having the working set of one process larger than RAM is > a highly unusual case ... No it's not, it's very similar to having several processes active whose working sets add up to more than RAM. > > The page replacement algorithm ought to do something sane with it, > > ... page replacement ought to give this process less RAM > because it isn't going to get enough to run anyway. No need > to have a process like qsbench make other processes run > slow, too. It should run the process as efficiently as possible, given that there isn't any competition. > > and swap performance ought to be decent in general, since desktop users > > typically have less than 1/2 GB. With media apps, bloated desktops and > > all, it doesn't go as far as it used to. > > The difference there is that desktops don't have a working > set larger than RAM. They've got a few (dozen?) of processes, > each of which has a working set that easily fits in ram and > a bunch of pages, or whole processes, which aren't currently > in use. Try loading a high res photo in gimp and running any kind of interesting script-fu on it. If it doesn't thrash, boot with half the memory and repeat. > In this situation the VM _can_ keep the whole working set in > RAM, simply by evicting the stuff that's not in the working > set. We're not talking about that case. Oh, by the way, since when did it become ok to ignore corner cases? I thought corner cases were what users have been flaming us about for the last 2 or 3 years. > > My impression is that page replacement just hasn't gotten a lot of > > attention recently, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's tuning, > > not a feature. > > As you write above, it's a pretty damn important feature, > though. One thing I'm experimenting with now for 2.4 rmap > is to ignore the referenced bit and page age if a page is > only in use by processes which haven't run recently, this > should help the desktop (and university) workloads by > swapping out memory from tasks which don't need it anyway > at the moment. > > There may be other modifications needed, too... No doubt, and for the first time, we've got a solid base to build on. -- Daniel - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/