On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, christian e wrote:
> Hi,all
>
> Can someone give me a pointer to how I can avoid somethign like this:
>
> foo@bar]$ free -m
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 249 245 4 0 6 136
> -/+ buffers/cache: 102 147
> Swap: 243 89 153
>
> What's with all the caching when my apps crawl because it's swapping so
> much ? I've tried to adjust /proc/vm/kswapd parameters but that doesn't
> seem to help..I'd like to postpone the swapping until its almost out of
> physical memory..
This may seem counterintuitive, but postponing swapping / cache flushing
to disk till the last possible moment is counterproductive. It's a
little like procrastination in the time management world -- when the
time finally comes when you *have* to flush stuff out to disk, your poor
daemons / kernel threads go catatonic trying to keep up, and you end up
both CPU-bound and I/O bound. It is far better to have enough free
memory available to satisfy the demand for pages, even if that means
*raising* the watermarks, *more* swapping and smaller page caches.
-- M. Edward Boraskyznmeb@borasky-research.net http://www.borasky-research.net
When puns are outlawed, only inlaws will have gnus.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 23 2001 - 21:00:22 EST