Horst von Brand <vonbrand@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said on Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:01:11 -0400:
Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.