Re: [ck] Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23

[Kevin Winchester]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:14:19 -0700
Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:02:56 +1000 "Matthew Hawkins" <darthmdh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > We all know swap prefetch has been tested out the wazoo since Moses was a
> > little boy, is compile-time and runtime selectable, and gives an important
> > and quantifiable performance increase to desktop systems.
> 
> Always interested.  Please provide us more details on your usage and
> testing of that code.  Amount of memory, workload, observed results,
> etc?
> 

I only have 512 MB of memory on my Athlon64 desktop box, and I switch between -mm and mainline kernels regularly.  I have noticed that -mm is always much more responsive, especially first thing in the morning.  I believe this has been due to the new schedulers in -mm (because I notice an improvement in mainline now that CFS has been merged), as well as swap prefetch.  I haven't tested swap prefetch alone to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely.

My workload is compiling kernels, with sylpheed, pidgin and firefox[1] open, and sometimes MonoDevelop if I want to slow my system to a crawl.

I will be getting another 512 MB of RAM at Christmas time, but from the other reports, it seems that swap prefetch will still be useful.

[1] Is there a graphical browser for linux that doesn't suck huge amounts of RAM?

-- 
Kevin Winchester

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