On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 19:18 -0400, Sam Drinkard wrote:
Johnny,
After reading about the VM issue, I concur. The previous kernel didexhibit the behavior noted in the URL you sent. Looking right now, I see a considerable difference in use / swap. The software running on the machine generally uses anwhere from 1.2 > 1.4Gb of memory, and I had noticed swap would, over time, increase, while there was still *some* memory available, but it never would use totally all of it. The application running right now is a little different from the one that runs late-night and after 16z, so I'll take a peek at it either tonight if I'm up or in the a.m. after the thing starts. I'll also note swap and its size as time progresses to see if it increases as before with free mem.
I forget the start of this thread... was 64 bit only? Anyway, I had my 32bit lock a couple times with symptoms like Sam mentions. Lots of swap used and no reason for it. Was using lots of open browsers, a couple different GUI MUAs, etc.
Turned off things I didn't need for this workstation behind firewall on cable, like sendmail, spamc/d (started by evolution as it needs regardless of system started), etc.
A *biggie*, maybe, is the stupid readahead and readahead_early stuff. Take a look at their file lists. Some small % suits your needs, the rest is just someone's idea of every possible thing that might speed up initial response. I completely disable these and have seen no difference. As I expected, after initial boot, most of it is wasted and the "non-manual" memory management does a better job than someone who probably got told "Make our boot faster than Windoze".
Up now for 6 days running similar load (I think, haven't bothered to really measure it) and swap use is still good and response is still good.
I suspect the heavy duty servers a lot of you have can also live without these readahead* things. Put a stopwatch on it and see. YMMV.
Thanks for the info.
HTH