Re: Which is better at vm, and why? 2.2 or 2.4

From: Patrick McFarland (unknown@panax.com)
Date: Sat Oct 13 2001 - 13:53:42 EST


Also, I'd like to say about the documentation...

<quote>
Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- bdflush
- buffermem
- freepages
- kswapd
- overcommit_memory
- page-cluster
- pagecache
- pagetable_cache
</quote>

but a simple ls of /proc/sys/vm reports:
bdflush kswapd overcommit_memory page-cluster pagetable_cache

Shouldnt the documentation be updated, seeing for the fact it was written in the 2.2.10 days?

On 13-Oct-2001, Patrick McFarland wrote:
> Ill reiterate something here, im on a p133 with 16 megs. Yeah, the kind of the crappy ide controller that eats cpu time to swap. (Enough so that my mouse pointer will freeze in X that its swapping so much. Swapping is the only thing ive found that can pull that off) Swapping the least ammount would be the best for a box like that.
>
> On 13-Oct-2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > On Sat, 13 Oct 2001, Patrick McFarland wrote:
> >
> > > Hmm, I see that as very bad. There should be a bunch of sysctls to do
> > > that easily.
> >
> > See /proc/sys/vm/* and the documentation ;)
> >
> > > Also, I heard that 2.4 (and I'm assuming 2.2 as well) swaps pages on a
> > > last-used-age basis, instead of either a number-of-times-used or a
> > > hybrid of the two. That kinda seems stupid,
> >
> > Don't worry since it's not true, at least the VM in the -ac
> > kernels _does_ use a hybrid of access recency and frequency
> > to determine page replacement.
> >
> > The -linus kernel, however only has LRU-like selection.
> >
> > At the moment the -linus kernel is faster than the -ac kernel
> > for some workloads. This may have something to do with better
> > clusterable IO ... when page replacement is less precise the
> > chance that IO is clusterable is probably larger due to the
> > way we scan.
> >
> > I plan to do more explicit IO clustering in -ac to try and
> > remedy this difference.
> >
> > regards,
> >
> > Rik
> > --
> > DMCA, SSSCA, W3C? Who cares? http://thefreeworld.net/ (volunteers needed)
> >
> > http://www.surriel.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/
> >
>
> --
> Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || unknown@panax.com

-- 
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || unknown@panax.com


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