Re: Swapping in 2.6.10 and 2.6.11.11 on a desktop system

[Alexander Gretencord <arutha@gmx.de>]

On Tuesday 14 June 2005 18:42, Con Kolivas wrote:
> Try the mapped watermark patch from -ck on 2.6.11*

Unfortunately this patch does not help either. The patch buys me time but then 
I get swapping at the 300MB mark. 2.6.8.1 with swappiness=0 swaps later than 
this...

These are 'free -m' statistics a minute after reaching the 300MB mark:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           503        498          5          0         36        376
-/+ buffers/cache:         85        418
Swap:          494        227        266

Why does the kernel think that I need 400MB of disk cache when I start some 
memory hungry apps? Can't we have a hard limit on disk cache, like: "Don't 
use more than 100MB of disk cache".

The problem seems to be that instead of using a big disk cache when theres 
plenty of ram and reducing disk cache when applications need the ram, the 
disk cache shrinks until a magic watermark and then grows and grows until 
theres no ram left for the applications. At least thats the behaviour I am 
seeing.


Alex

P.S.: Please cc me as I'm not on the list.
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