Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:57:25 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl, nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au, jgarzik@pobox.com,
       brettspamacct@fastclick.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell
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Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> Andrew wrote:
> > Two things:
> > a) a knob to say "only reclaim pagecache".  We have that now.
> > b) a knob to say "reclaim vfs caches harder" ...
> 
> Are these knobs system wide in affect, or per job?
> I am presuming system wide.

yup, system-wide.

> When I'm working late, I want my updatedb/backup jobs
> to scrunch themselves into a corner, even as my builds
> and gui desktop continue to fly and suck up RAM.

Sure.  That's not purely a cacheing thing though. Even if the background
activity was clamped to just a few megs of cache you'll find that the
seek activity is a killer, and needs a limitation mechanism.  Although the
anticipatory scheduler helps here a lot.
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