Re: [ckrm-tech] [RFC][PATCH 5/8] RSS controller task migration support

[Alan <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:25:33 +0100 (CET)
> For a customer the main reason to use guarantee is to be sure that
> some pages of a job remain in memory when the system is low on free
> memory. This should be true even for a job in group/container A with

That actually doesn't appear a very useful definition.

There are two reasons for wanting memory guarantees

#1	To be sure a user can't toast the entire box but just their own
	compartment (eg web hosting)

#2	To ensure all apps continue to make progress

The simple approach doesn't seem to work for either. There is a threshold
above which #1 and #2 are the same thing, below that trying to keep a few
pages in memory will thrash not make progress and will harm overall
behaviour thus failing to solve #1 or #2. At that point you have to
decide whether what you have is a misconfiguration or whether the system
should be prepared to do temporary cycling overcommits so containers take
it in turn to make progress when overcommitted.

> If the limit is a "hard limit" then we have implemented reservation and
> this is too strict.

Thats fundamentally a judgement based on your particular workload and
constraints. If I am web hosting then I don't generally care if my end
users compartment blows up under excess load, I care that the other 200
customers using the box don't suffer and all phone me to complain.

Alan
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