Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk

[Jim MacBaine <jmacbaine@gmail.com>]

On 1/14/06, Nick Craig-Wood <nick@craig-wood.com> wrote:

> On my home workstation I do a lot of stuff with very large video
> files, so set swappiness to 0 some time ago so using these large files
> would stop all the applications getting pushed out into swap.

My motivation was similar: My desktop usually runs 24 hrs and I leave
large applications which I use from time to time always open. Like
OpenOffice, Firefox, Emacs with large buffers, etc.  In the night, the
machine performs two disk-intensive tasks.  First a backup then
updatedb. And every morning about 650 MB of 1 GB RAM is used for
caches and all my application need to be swapped in before I can use
them.

Of course, the increase of disk cache is reasonable for those tasks,
but honestly, I don't care whether the updatedb process takes 10 or 20
minutes in the night. But I do care if switching between applications
needs >10 seconds in the morning.

Would it be possible to trigger paging in specific applications from
userspace? So I might run something like

echo -n firefox-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in
echo -n soffice-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in
...

after my nightly cron jobs have filled the memory with disk cache data
that won't be useful anymore, because in my daily work I rarely touch
10% of the filesystem.

Regards,
Jim
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