Re: ~500 megs cached yet 2.6.5 goes into swap hell

[Jeff Garzik]

Andrew Morton wrote:
> Andy Isaacson <adi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > But in a related case, I have a background daemon that does a lot of IO
> > (mostly sequential, one page at a time read/modify/write of a multi-GB
> > file) to a filesystem on a separate spindle from my main filesystems.
> > I'd like to use a similar mechanism to say "don't let this program eat
> > my pagecache" that will let the daemon crunch away without severely
> > impacting my desktop work.
>
>
> fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) is ideal for this.  Run it once per megabyte
> or so.


Sweet.  I'm so happy you added posix_fadvise (way back when), and even 
happier to hear this.

Does our fadvise support len==0 ("I mean the whole file")?  That's 
defined in POSIX, and would allow a compliant app to simply 
POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED once at the beginning.

	Jeff



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