Re: Perfect buffer/swapping in pre-patch-2.0.31-2 + a few changes

Philippe Strauss (philou@lili.urbanet.ch)
Sun, 13 Jul 1997 23:47:18 +0200

On Jul 12, Erik Andersen wrote
> On Jul 10, Dr. Werner Fink wrote
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm writing this mail in rmail-mode of emacs on a X display on a system
> > load between 9 and 29 due a pair running `make -j' in two kernel trees
> > together with a `tar tfvz <66434131Kb_gzip_tar_on_NFS> > /dev/null '.
> >
> > Sometimes it's a bit slow if the load is above 20 :-) ... but it works
> > quit good. It's only a i586/133 with 64Mb and 80Mb swap.
> >
>
> I just tried your patch, and it seems to work VERY well. I just did a
> make -j kernel compile while running netscape, and reading the linux-kernel
> mailing list. My system load got so high that xload was completely black,
> but everything worked, and mutt (my mail program) was only a bit sluggish.
> This is on an AMD K6 200, 32 Megs ram, 64 Megs swap, with the perfect buffer
> cache patch on top of pre-patch-2.0.31-2 and some IDE patches from Gadi Oxman.
> This may really be the perfect buffer cache patch. No more thrashing
> for swap when the system load goes balistic. Good work!
>
> -Erik
>
> --
> Erik B. Andersen Web: http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/
> email: andersee@debian.org
> --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--

Yeap, this patch works rather fine. Just to small concern:
Doing a badblock -w /dev/sdb1 (a 1GB disk) num-o-blocks leave
my system not really usable (you have to wait 15 secs for badblocks to
finish when you hit ctl-C on its VC), and the number reported by free
a funny:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63224 62472 752 5240 43980
^^^^^^^
Ahem
-/+ buffers: 18492 4151076
^^^^^^^
Whaoooo
Swap: 68536 5672 62864 4684

I'm running 2.0.30 with the following patches

1 ./ 0 ext2-error 0 pre31-2
1 ../ 0 filehandle 0 stack-not-exec
0 buff-werner-11-jul 0 ft.pf

My computer is a P5 166 64MB of ram, scsi disks, ncrBsd scsi driver.

Cheers.

-- 
Philippe Strauss <philou@lili.urbanet.ch>


Homepage & PGP key:	http://lili.urbanet.ch


"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World
 War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

--