Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:18:17 -0700
From: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Shailabh Nagar <nagar@watson.ibm.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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Andrew wrote:
> 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.

True - the seek activity is another critical resource that would need to
be throttled to keep updatedb/backup from interferring with my late
night labours.

Let's see, that's:
 1) cpu scheduling ticks
 2) memory for virtual address backing store
 3) memory for file related caching
 4) disk arm motion

Hmmm ... actually not so much a numa-placement extension, but rather a
CKRM opportunity.

CKRM focuses on measuring and restraining how much of specified critical
resources a task is using; numa placement on which cpus or memory nodes
are allowed to be used at all.

See further the CKRM thread of Shailabh Nagar, also running on lkml
today.

-- 
                          I won't rest till it's the best ...
                          Programmer, Linux Scalability
                          Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> 1.650.933.1373
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