Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264110AbUDRDiW (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 Apr 2004 23:38:22 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264112AbUDRDiW (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 Apr 2004 23:38:22 -0400 Received: from smtp107.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([66.163.169.227]:57004 "HELO smtp107.mail.sc5.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S264110AbUDRDiU (ORCPT ); Sat, 17 Apr 2004 23:38:20 -0400 Message-ID: <4081F809.4030606@yahoo.com.au> Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 13:37:45 +1000 From: Nick Piggin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040401 Debian/1.6-4 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Marc Singer CC: Andrew Morton , wli@holomorphy.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: vmscan.c heuristic adjustment for smaller systems References: <20040417193855.GP743@holomorphy.com> <20040417212958.GA8722@flea> <20040417162125.3296430a.akpm@osdl.org> <20040417233037.GA15576@flea> <20040417165151.24b1fed5.akpm@osdl.org> <20040418002343.GA16025@flea> In-Reply-To: <20040418002343.GA16025@flea> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1288 Lines: 38 Marc Singer wrote: > On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 04:51:51PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > >>Marc Singer wrote: >> >>>On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 04:21:25PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: >>> >>>> >>>>How on earth can it take half a minute to list /proc? >>> >>>I've watched the vmscan code at work. The memory pressure is so high >>>that it reclaims mapped pages zealously. The program's code pages are >>>being evicted frequently. >> >>Which tends to imply that the VM is not reclaiming any of that nfs-backed >>pagecache. > > > I don't think that's the whole story. They question is why. > swappiness is pretty arbitrary and unfortunately it means different things to machines with different sized memory. Also, once you *have* gone past the reclaim_mapped threshold, mapped pages aren't really given any preference above unmapped pages. I have a small patchset which splits the active list roughly into mapped and unmapped pages. It might hopefully solve your problem. Would you give it a try? It is pretty stable here. Nick - 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/