Messages in this thread | | | From | Nick Warne <> | Subject | Re: 2.4.28 -> ch..ch...changes.... | Date | Wed, 24 Nov 2004 19:57:14 +0000 |
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On Wednesday 24 November 2004 17:48, Hugh Dickins wrote: > On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:36:36PM +0000, Nick Warne wrote: > > > I updated three boxes today to 2.4.28 (from .27), one at work, and two > > > here at home (Redhat 7.1+, Slackware 10) > > > > > > I am intrigued terribly by the small footprint of memory usage now. I > > > have gone through the changes file, but can really see nothing (to me, > > > a n00b) that would alter that? > > > > > > Can anyone enlighten me? > > > > What do you mean by "memory usage"? SLAB (/proc/slabinfo) buffers > > or pagecache ? > > > > Whats your workload and what drivers are you using ? > > > > Nothing that I am aware of explains this. > > _If_ it's a reduction in /proc/slabinfo's dentry_cache, and > _if_ these boxes do a lot of removing files from tmpfs, > then it would be the "tmpfs: stop negative dentries".
I dunno, no real scientific measures at all, but I have noticed using 'free' all boxes from boot load load like 40% less in memory. As time goes on, memory usage grows (of course), but now it 'drops off' when not being used... 2.4.2x never done that.
I tested today on my Slackware box especially:
Linux linuxamd 2.4.28 #1 Tue Nov 23 17:46:52 GMT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux (HM, append="1280M").
An Athlon 1.2Ghz running all up to date Slack 10 stable with KDE 3.3.0 upgrade.
I ran Celestia for over an hour, burnt a few knoppix ISO's, and then ISO'ed a big directory to burn all using 'BashBurn'.
Just played Quake2 for three maps running full chat.
Normally memory slowly fills up, perhaps using swap for a bit under these circumstances - but looking afterwards:
root@linuxamd:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1292348 520012 772336 0 38596 327304 -/+ buffers/cache: 154112 1138236 Swap: 1959888 0 1959888
I would normally expect 'free' to report 900000 odd (with Celestia pushing toward swap) by now... but it doesn't.
Another box,:
Linux quake.ddayuk.dyndns.org 2.4.28 #1 Tue Nov 23 17:28:32 GMT 2004 i686 unknown
Runs a Quake2 server and Teamspeak. Again, usually after 2 hours uptime nearly hits peak, but now:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 516440 45368 471072 0 6296 25556 -/+ buffers/cache: 13516 502924 Swap: 265032 0 265032
The box at work is a back-up httpd (apache) web server running NTPD for whole sub-net, mrtg, and a lot of other stuff (I use for testing stuff until I push to main web server)... this always has 30/40MB disk swap. Today only 6MB.
I build all kernels with no modules, all built in (expect USB for memory sticks on slack). The only change I done this time from previous kernel upgrades was download the full 2.4.28 bz2 file rather than apply patches to existing build trees (make oldconfig).
But whatever, I am impressed indeed - somethings changed for the good!!!
Nick
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