Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S265083AbUD3Ge7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Apr 2004 02:34:59 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265084AbUD3Ge7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Apr 2004 02:34:59 -0400 Received: from smtp100.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([216.136.174.138]:2168 "HELO smtp100.mail.sc5.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S265083AbUD3Ge5 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Apr 2004 02:34:57 -0400 Message-ID: <4091F38C.3010400@yahoo.com.au> Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:34:52 +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: Tim Connors CC: Horst von Brand , Jeff Garzik , Andrew Morton , brettspamacct@fastclick.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell References: <40904A84.2030307@yahoo.com.au> <200404292001.i3TK1BYe005147@eeyore.valparaiso.cl> In-Reply-To: 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: 1600 Lines: 43 Tim Connors wrote: > Horst von Brand said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:01:11 -0400: > >>Nick Piggin said: >> >>[...] >> >> >>>I don't know. What if you have some huge application that only >>>runs once per day for 10 minutes? Do you want it to be consuming >>>100MB of your memory for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes for >>>no good reason? >> >>How on earth is the kernel supposed to know that for this one particular >>job you don't care if it takes 3 hours instead of 10 minutes, just because >>you don't want to spare enough preciousss RAM? > > > Note that we are not talking about having insufficient memory. In my > case (2.4 kernel - ie, 2.6 with swapiness 0%) there is more than > enough memory to contain all my working set - it's only because cache > is too eager to claim memory that is otherwise in use that > non-optimalities occur. > Well depends on what you mean by working set. In our memory manager, there is a point where often used "file cache" (ie. unmapped cache) is considered preferable to unused or little used "application memory" (mapped memory). There will be a point where even the most swap phobic desktop users will want to start swapping. I missed the description of your exact problem... was it in this thread somewhere? Testing 2.6 would be appreciated if possible too. - 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/