Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 31 Mar 1998 15:13:11 +0200 (CEST) | From | "Krzysztof G. Baranowski" <> | Subject | Re: swap killer kernels |
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While testing the million monkey theory, Linus Torvalds wrote: >The 2.1.x kernels almost require a swap area. They should work without >one, but as you see they can get rather upset if they don't find one. [...] >Note that this really isn't anything new as of 2.1.x - it's fairly true >in 2.0.x too. It just becomes more obvious when the pager is more >aggressive. That's obvious, but the problem with my setup (32 MB RAM, 16 SWAP) was that kernel (2.1.91) always tried to keep 6,5-7 MB of free memory, even for price of constant swapping. The amount of free memory was _never_ lower than about 6,5 MB. If I started an application kernel swapped out the memory to keep 6,5-7 MB free.
.92-pre looks a little bit better, but I haven't stressed it as much as 2.1.91. The worst thing with 2.1.91 was that it swapped to death at night, when the machine was totally idle, no users, only few standard daemons. I left the machine at about 2 AM (the cron-daily has been done at 1 AM), and it woke me up at 5AM with constant swapping. I could only use SysRq.
I think I'll wait till 2.1.92 will be released and then do some more tests. Then I'll go back with some more reports and we will see if kswapd should be tuned a little.
Regards, Kris -- Krzysztof G. Baranowski - President of the Harmless Manyacs' Club "Smith & Wesson - The original point and click interface..." http://www.knm.org.pl/ <prezes@manjak.knm.org.pl>
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