Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264881AbUD2QZN (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:25:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264888AbUD2QZN (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:25:13 -0400 Received: from e2.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.102]:50835 "EHLO e2.ny.us.ibm.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264881AbUD2QZJ (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:25:09 -0400 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:24:13 -0700 From: "Martin J. Bligh" To: Andrew Morton , Jeff Garzik cc: brettspamacct@fastclick.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell Message-ID: <44780000.1083255853@flay> In-Reply-To: <20040428184008.226bd52d.akpm@osdl.org> References: <409021D3.4060305@fastclick.com><20040428170106.122fd94e.akpm@osdl.org><409047E6.5000505@pobox.com><40905127.3000001@fastclick.com><20040428180038.73a38683.akpm@osdl.org><4090595D.6050709@pobox.com> <20040428184008.226bd52d.akpm@osdl.org> X-Mailer: Mulberry/2.1.2 (Linux/x86) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1250 Lines: 25 >> These are at the heart of the thread (or my point, at >> least) -- BloatyApp may be Oracle with a huge cache of its own, for >> which swapping out may be a huge mistake. Or Mozilla. After some >> amount of disk IO on my 512MB machine, Mozilla would be swapped out... >> when I had only been typing an email minutes before. > > OK, so it takes four seconds to swap mozilla back in, and you noticed it. > > Did you notice that those three kernel builds you just did ran in twenty > seconds less time because they had more cache available? Nope. The latency for interactive stuff is definitely more noticeable though, and thus arguably more important. Perhaps we should be tying the scheduler in more tightly with the VM - we've already decided there which apps are "interactive" and thus need low latency ... shouldn't we be giving a boost to their RAM pages as well, and favour keeping those paged in over other pages (whether other apps, or cache) logically? It's all latency still ... M. - 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/