Charles, Can you please try the attached patch against 2.6.16.1 which I use on my desktop since I encountered the same issues when running GNOME/Firefox etc. After booting the patched kernel, leave swappiness unchanged but do the following: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/mapped_bias This should allow mapped memory to stay pretty close to 80% as implied by the default swappiness value of 60 and prevent the swap storms. Andrew et al, details on the patch are as follows. 1. Unmapped pages are kept the inactive list as much as possible. 2. Only partially written pages are marked as referenced so kswapd can initiate writeback on the first scan for sequentially written files. 3. The scanner will set PG_reclaim for pages found in writeback. 4. The scanner will scan the LRU twice. On the first pass, the distress logic is disabled while on the second pass, it is applied as before. This permits a full scan of the inactive list before distress swapping begins. 5. The slab scanner only takes into account the size of the inactive list and scans the slab at 1/2 the rate of the inactive list for DEFAULT_SEEKS. This prevents spurious pageouts during heavy slab usage such as when running updatedb. 6. reclaim_mapped is made part of scan_control so it can be used by shrink_list() in addition to refill_inactive_zone() to prevent mapped memory reclamation and staying within the bounds dictated by swappiness. Thanks, Shantanu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
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01-mapped-bias.patch
Description: 2495889862-01-mapped-bias.patch
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