Re: [RFC] Limit the size of the pagecache

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> This is a patch using some of Aubrey's work plugging it in what is IMHO 
> the right way. Feel free to improve on it. I have gotten repeatedly 
> requests to be able to limit the pagecache. With the revised VM statistics 
> this is now actually possile. I'd like to know more about possible uses of 
> such a feature.
>
>
>
>
> It may be useful to limit the size of the page cache for various reasons
> such as
>
> 1. Insure that anonymous pages that may contain performance
>    critical data is never subject to swap.
>
> 2. Insure rapid turnaround of pages in the cache.

So if these two aren't working properly at 100%, then I want to know the
reason why. Or at least see what the workload and the numbers look like.

> 3. Reserve memory for other uses? (Aubrey?)

Maybe. This is still a bad hack, and I don't like to legitimise such use
though. I hope Aubrey isn't relying on this alone for his device to work
because his customers might end up hitting fragmentation problems sooner
or later.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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