> "Michael O'Reilly" <michael@metal.iinet.net.au> writes:
> >
> > Ahhh. No, it's actually the reverse. I was trying to swap out pages
> > that weren't in use, in favour of the buffer cache. The problem was
> > that due to the size of the buffer cache, it would never fail to free
> > a page, so try_to_free_page() would never attempt to swap anything,
> > even tho there was about 15meg of memory used in long running daemons
> > etc.
> >
> I have the exact same problem with our News server, only more so.
>
> No good solution has been found yet. The simple but unfortunately wrong
> thing to do, i.e. to alternately use the three memory areas for reclamation
> of space, won't work.
It does if you use a tuning parameter. What I have is
Use the first two area alternately, and every 20th try, use
the swap area.
Where '20th' is something changable via sysctl.
> IMHO the best way to work around this is to periodically (with an
> adjustable period) use the 'other' allocation methods even if the one
> currently preferred doesn't fail. I'll write up a patch for that. Swapctl
> has enough unused parameters anyway. ;-)
>
> --
> Matthias Urlichs
> noris network GmbH