Re: Very aggressive swapping after 2 hours rest

From: Byron Stanoszek (gandalf@winds.org)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 11:56:10 EST


On Sat, 16 Sep 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Sep 2000, Dietmar Kling wrote:
>
> > i thought i add a report to the new VM in 2.4.0pre9
> >
> > My Machine has 256 MB of memory
> > I left it for two hours ( several Netscapes -Instances,
> > Mail and xmms running _nothing in swap_ )
> >
> > When I tried to restart my work after 2 hours,
> > the machine started swapping madly.
>
> Does this swapping storm get less (or even go
> away?) when you apply my small patch to test9-pre1?
>
> http://www.surriel.com/patches/2.4.0-t9-vmpatch

I think I might have a similar problem with 2.4.0-t8-vmpatch2, related to
caching. Without the vmpatch, my standard system 'used' would be near 28mb
actual in use, the rest cached or in buffers. When I tried vmpatch2, standard
usage eventually got up to 44mb when using the same programs and processes,
with 1600kb of buffers and about 78mb of cache (with 2 days of uptime).

Then I tried a: find / -name *.pdf

The size of the buffers increased to 16mb as expected, but also the amount of
memory 'in use' also increased by 16mb! Free shows:

             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 126516 123312 3204 0 16496 46084
-/+ buffers/cache: 60732 65784
Swap: 32124 0 32124

That 60732 figure used to be around 44000 before the 'find'.

I'm trying test9 to see if that behaves any better, then I'll try
2.4.0-t9-vmpatch.

Have you encountered this buffer problem before, Rik?

-- 
Byron Stanoszek                         Ph: (330) 644-3059
Systems Programmer                      Fax: (330) 644-8110
Commercial Timesharing Inc.             Email: bstanoszek@comtime.com

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