On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Ken Brownfield wrote:
>
> Well, I think you'll be pleased to hear that your untested patch
> compiled, booted, _and_ fixed the problem. :)
Good. The patch itself was fairly simple, and the problem was
straightforward, the real credit for the fix goes to Andrea for thinking
about what was wrong with the old code..
> The minimum free RAM was about 9.8-11MB (matching your guestimate) and
> kswapd seemed to behave the same as the watermark patch. The results of
> top were basically the same, so I'm omitting it.
All right. I think 10MB free for a 3GB machine is good - and we can easily
tweak the zone_balance_max[] numbers if somebody comes to the conclusion
that it's better to have more free. It's about .3% of RAM, so it's small
enough that it's certainly not too much, and yet at the same time it's
probably enough to give reasonable behaviour in a temporary memory crunch.
> However, I do have some profiling numbers, thanks to Marcelo. Attached
> are numbers from "readprofile | sort -nr +2 | head -20". I think the
> pre4 numbers point to shrink_cache, prune_icache, and statm_pgd_range.
> The other two might have significance for wizards, but statistically
> don't stand out to me, except maybe statm_pgd_range.
I'd say that this clearly shows that yes, 2.4.14 did the wrong thing, and
wasted time in shrink_cache() without making any real progress. The two
other profiles look reasonable to me - nothing stands out that shouldn't.
(yeah, we spend _much_ too much time doing VM statistics with "top", and
the only way to get rid of that would be to add a per-vma "rss" field.
Which might not be a bad idea, but it's not a high priority for me).
> I reset the counters just before starting Oracle and the stress test. I
> think a -pre7 with a blessed patch would be good, since my testing was
> very narrow.
Sude, I'll do a pre7. This closes my last behaviour issue with the VM,
although I'm sure we'll end up spending tons of time chasing bugs still
(both VM and not).
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 23 2001 - 21:00:22 EST