Re: buffers vs. pages vs. kernel speed
Petri Kaukasoina (kaukasoi@elektroni.ee.tut.fi)
Fri, 13 Jun 1997 11:09:31 +0300
On Thu, Jun 12, 1997 at 05:36:20AM -0400, David S. Miller wrote:
> Let's try this one... this has:
>
> 1) buffer cache clean buffer out of memory fixes
> 2) handle multi-page allocations in low memory situations
> (sans GFP_ATOMIC) more gracefully
> 3) Matthias's state machine fix
> 4) Debugging code added to try_to_free_page() for when it fails
With that patch on pre-patch-2.0.31-2 this kind of command:
gunzip -c largefile.gz | egrep 'regexp'
made the system rather unresponsive. Without the patch the command does
not affect the responsiveness.
I have a 66 MHz 486, 16 megs of ram. The 'largefile' was on a local ide
disk and the size of the (compressed) file was 17 megs. Nothing
mentionable running at the same time.