Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 00:55:59 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 00:55:49 -0500 Received: from w147.z064001233.sjc-ca.dsl.cnc.net ([64.1.233.147]:11985 "EHLO funky.gghcwest.COM") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 00:55:40 -0500 Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 21:54:49 -0800 (PST) From: "Jeffrey W. Baker" X-X-Sender: To: Daniel Phillips cc: Subject: Re: kswapd etc hogging machine In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Daniel Phillips wrote: > On January 3, 2002 06:15 am, Andrew Morton wrote: > > And we, the kernel developers, should hang our heads over this. A > > vendor-released, stable kernel is performing terribly with such a > > simple workload. One year after the release of 2.4.0! > > To be fair, in the year leading up to 2.4.0 much energy was expended on > getting the bugs out of the unified and heaviliy threaded page+buffer > cache[1], at the expense of work on the memory manager, so 2001 ended up > being like a whole new kernel cycle. Anyway, the saving grace is that 2.2 > managed to metamorphose from ugly duckling to... quite a nice duck, with > almost all the features of 2.4 from the user's point of view. So everybody > has something to run. > > With 20 20 hindsight, the VM work could have been managed better but I don't > see why anybody's head needs to be hung. It was a bumpy road, we had to > change a few tires, but we got to the other side of the mountain. We did? I'm running the last released kernel and today I got an OOM event when 1.4 GB main memory was used for buffer cache. I have to babysit any Linux 2.4 machines that have interesting workloads. 2.4 may have reached a local maximum, but the ascent to the peak is still in front of us. -jwb - 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/