Fedora Users — 2.6.6-1.435: kswapd clears out cache?

2.6.6-1.435: kswapd clears out cache?

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To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx

Subject: 2.6.6-1.435: kswapd clears out cache?

From: Philip Molter <philip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 07:56:02 -0500

Reply-to: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx>

User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 (Windows/20040616)

I have a box I recently updated to kernel 2.6.6-1.435 from 2.6.5-1.358. This box has no swap and 4GB of memory. Normally, when it runs, about 2.5GB of that memory is consumed by file cache. This is the desired behavior. After upgrading to 2.6.6-1.435, at least once every five minutes, kswapd runs and completely wipes out the file cache. It's not caching other information, it's just completely clearing it out so the box has about 2.5GB of memory free. This isn't desired, because then all the stuff that was cached needs to be re-cached, pegging I/O on the box and killing performance of our application.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is there something I can do to stop it? I've tried changing the swappiness level to 0 with no affect (I didn't expect one since there is no swap).

TIA,
Philip