Re: RFT: updatedb "morning after" problem [was: Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23]

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On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Rene Herman wrote:

On 07/27/2007 07:45 PM, Daniel Hazelton wrote:

 Updatedb or another process that uses the FS heavily runs on a users
 256MB P3-800 (when it is idle) and the VFS caches grow, causing memory
 pressure that causes other applications to be swapped to disk. In the
 morning the user has to wait for the system to swap those applications
 back in.

 Questions about it:
 Q) Does swap-prefetch help with this? A) [From all reports I've seen (*)]
Yes, it does.

No it does not. If updatedb filled memory to the point of causing swapping (which noone is reproducing anyway) it HAS FILLED MEMORY and swap-prefetch hasn't any memory to prefetch into -- updatedb itself doesn't use any significant memory.

however there are other programs which are known to take up significant amounts of memory and will cause the issue being described (openoffice for example)

please don't get hung up on the text 'updatedb' and accept that there are programs that do run intermittently and do use a significant amount of ram and then free it.

David Lang

Here's swap-prefetch's author saying the same:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/9/112

|  It can't help the updatedb scenario. Updatedb leaves the ram full and
|  swap prefetch wants to cost as little as possible so it will never
|  move anything out of ram in preference for the pages it wants to swap
|  back in.

Now please finally either understand this, or tell us how we're wrong.

Rene.

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