Re: A scrub daemon (prezeroing)

From: Christoph Lameter
Date: Fri Feb 04 2005 - 01:55:17 EST


On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Nick Piggin wrote:

> If you have got to the stage of doing "real world" tests, I'd be
> interested to see results of tests that best highlight the improvements.

I am trying to figure out which tests to use right now.

> I imagine many general purpose server things wouldn't be helped much,
> because they'll typically have little free memory, and will be
> continually working and turning things over.

These things are helped because zapping memory is very fast. Continual
turning things over results in zapping of large memory areas once in
awhile which even speeds up (a sparsely accessing) benchmark. Read my
earlier posts on the subject.

There is of course an issue if the system is continuously low on memory.
In that case the buddy allocator may not generate large enough orders of
free pages to make it worth to zap them.
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