>Can someone explain or point me to a reference for the /proc/sys/vm control
>interface?
Here's a text I submitted to Linux for inclusion in
Documentation/memory-tuning.txt . An earlier version was in pre-2.0.31-2.
There are several files in /proc/sys/vm you can use to tune the
memory system with.
You inspect them with 'cat', and set them with 'echo'. For example,
/proc/sys/vm/freepages:
'# cat /proc/sys/vm/freepages' may yield:
64 96 128
These three numbers are: min_free_pages, free_pages_low and
free_pages_high.
You can adjust these with a command such as:
# echo "128 256 512" > /proc/sys/vm/freepages
Free memory never goes down below min_free_pages except for atomic
allocation. Background swapping is started if the number of free
pages falls below free_pages_high, and intensive swapping is started
below free_pages_low. A "page" is 4 kB.
The values selected as boot defaults are the following: For a
machine with n>=8 Megabytes of memory, set min_free_pages = n*2,
free_pages_low = n*3 and free_pages_high = n*4. Machines with less
than 8 Megabytes or less as if they had 8 Megabytes.
If "out of memory" errors sometimes occur, or if your machine does lots
of networking, increasing min_free_pages to 64 or more may be a good
idea.
free_pages_low should probably be about double of min_free_pages.
After a period of inactivity, the difference between free_pages_high and
free_pages low is immediately available for any program you want to
start up, without any need to swap out anything else. If your memory
is large enough (e.g. > 16 Meg), keeping 2 or 3 megabytes of memory
ready for this purpose is probably a good idea.
I've found that
# echo "128 256 1024" > /proc/sys/vm/freepages
gives good performance for a 32 Meg system used as a small server and
personal workstation.
The other three files in /proc/sys/vm are undocumented, as yet.
Thomas Koenig, ig25@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
-- Thomas Koenig, Thomas.Koenig@ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de, ig25@dkauni2.bitnet. The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic diagram.