I booted up into pre7-1, with the semi-colon fix for Rik's patch, and
also davem's fix for the swap cache leak, and VM performance is much
higher than its been in a long time.
0. I have a 64Mb PPro.
1. I never see the "kswapd uses high % of CPU time" problem on this
machine. That probably isn't fixed - I can't tell.
2. However, I used to have massive amounts of swap (like 30Mb) used
while I had around 32 Mb of cache. THis seemed wrong, and lead to awful
interactivity. For example, just running netscape and maybe emacs would
swap out the GNOME taskbar.
3. I know have much less swap used than before [e.g. with pre5] - about
64% of the previous level, only about 12Mb now.
4. Using qps, I see that unused daemons are taking up swap. NETSCAPE AND
EMACS HAVE 0 BYTES SWAPPED OUT. That is a big improvement over say 6MB
for netscape and 2.5 Mb for emacs. (Still is that possible, w/o a bug?
Maybe the fix in pre7 to keep the LRU lists long is responsible, but I
don't know...)
5. The machine will actually get below 50% of memory in page cache.
With pre5, and to some extent pre6, this basically never happened.
6. Is there any way to TELL WHAT is IN the page cache? Its hard to tell
if the kernel is making right decision about swapping versus shrinking
the page cache, since I don't know what the cache contains. I DO know
what swap contains...
Thanks for listening...
-benRI
-- "I want to be in the light, as He is in the Light, I want to shine like the stars in the heavens." - DC Talk, "In the Light" Benjamin Redelings I <>< http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~bredelin/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 30 2000 - 21:00:17 EST