Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 18 Apr 2002 11:07:43 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 18 Apr 2002 11:07:42 -0400 Received: from relay02.esat.net ([192.111.39.21]:46601 "EHLO relay02.esat.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 18 Apr 2002 11:07:41 -0400 Message-ID: <3CBEE0AA.7060309@palamon.ie> Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:05:14 +0100 From: Tony Clarke User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020311 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Helge Hafting CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: VM Related question In-Reply-To: <3CBE8FBB.8080108@palamon.ie> <3CBEC025.141CAA76@aitel.hist.no> 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 >>I have noticed with my current kernel that after the system is idle for >>a while, say 10 hours or >>so, that everything seems to be swapped out to disk. So when I come in >>the next morning >>it starts swapping everything like crazy in from disk. Is this a known >>characteristic of the >>VM. I seem to remember this with all 2.4 kernels tried to date. >> >>Whats the point of swapping out to disk in circumstances like this? >> >>Currently I am using 2.4.18-rc2-ac2, with apps like mozilla, dozen >>xterms, xemacs, staroffice etc. >> > >The kernel makes no decision to swap just because you left the >machine. But your distro probably runs "updatedb" at night. >Updatedb reads all the directories in all your filesystems, so >it tends to use a lot of cache. This activity pushes >lots of other stuff into swap. > Yep. That makes sense. /proc/slabinfo looks like inode_cache 60311 60312 512 8616 8616 1 dentry_cache 60301 63930 128 2131 2131 1 buffer_head 35115 40620 128 1348 1354 1 this is on a 256mb machine. Would I be right in saying that the only way that memory gets reclaimed , is by some process requesting memory or by some process waking up and having a load of page faults? Cheers, Tony. - 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/