Re: [OT] No Swap. Re: [BUG 2.6.90-test5] kernel shits itself with48mb ram under moderate load

From: Ihar 'Philips' Filipau
Date: Sun Sep 28 2003 - 12:53:11 EST


Mikulas Patocka wrote:


Yes, it should. If you have 0.25GB, it can be copied into cache. If you
have 0.125GB, it doesn't fit there.

So you want to say to effectively copy (or whatever) 40GB harddrive I
have to have 40GB of RAM? Ridiculous.

Other unices (Solaris, IRIX) don't have dynamic cache that resizes
according to RAM, always copy data from disk to disk and so they are

It is slow. But when someone compile something on our Linux cross compilation server - everyone else is out - "jerky" is not suffieciently hard word to describe how it works under load. (I hope 2.6 fixes this.)

Sun Ultra 10 (Solaris 8) is magnitude slower, but when someone compiles something big - people still _*can*_ work on it. "find | xargs grep" is still ok. I notice usually background compilations by fact that :w takes visibly longer. But I can work.

That's what matters. Try to work in vim if it is permanently get swaped out. _*Very*_ _*very*_ not nice.
And there is no memory pressure - kernel just decided to enlarge I/O cache... 100% stupid.

I personally prefer to have statical I/O cache - never saw it working reliably with dynamic allocation.

order-of-magnitude slower than Linux. Did you ever tried to grep for
symbols in linux source tree unpacked on Solaris box with 512MB RAM? ---
it's just as slow as linux with very few RAM, because Solaris can't cache
data in RAM.


--
Ihar 'Philips' Filipau / with best regards from Saarbruecken.
--
"... and for $64000 question, could you get yourself vaguely
familiar with the notion of on-topic posting?"
-- Al Viro @ LKML

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