On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 09:57 -0400, Sam Drinkard wrote:
William L. Maltby wrote:
On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 19:18 -0400, Sam Drinkard wrote:
Johnny,
After reading about the VM issue, I concur. <snip>
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 <snip>
A *biggie*, maybe, is the stupid readahead and readahead_early stuff.
<snip>
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.
<snip>
After uptime of a little over 3 days now, I'm not seeing any increase in swap as I did prior, but then again, I don't exactly recall how long it took before swap started increasing.
For my symptoms to appear, it took a combo of time up and an increase in load. Don't know if this is coincidence or cause and effect.
One thing I do notice is for some reason, the applications that nomally would consume between 1.2 - 1.4G of memory is now down to 1.1 - 1.2, and swap is only lightly touched at 181mb.
Again, mine is only a workstation, so I don't know how this applies to you. My max on the previous session was 64k into swap. That was about 4 days up, IIRC and I tried at several points to dupe the conditions (opened several browsers, multiple users, several different type/instances of MUAs, several ssh to my LAN server, etc.).
I've since turned sendmail back on so I can do some LAN-internal things with it. Pretty much stock config except that I removed the restriction on localhost (a DAEMON_OPTION in the sendmail.mc file). Needed to reboot to to test LVM config changes (new stuff for me) and after a day and a half of running, 0k in swap with medium load.
Don't know if this is due to the kernal update or what, but it would seem logical that it is, since I see different behavior than previously. I've not turned off readahead or readahead_early yet, but will do so shortly and see if I can tell any difference in model run times which did increase after the kernel update. One thing at a time I guess :-)
Theoretically, there ought to be a decrease in startup times at certain points _early_in_the_uptime_cycle. IMO, after a "steady state" typical loading is achieved (hours, day, weeks??) there should be no or reduced improvement (maybe decreased too *if* this forces some spurious swap activity?).
*If* your config is anything similar to mine (or any generic?), I doubt you'll find any long-term gain significant enough to warrant even the near-zero maintenance of two more scripts and associated files.
It's the old "It doesn't cost me anything, but I get no benefit either" routine. I almost always opt for excision of the wart. Sometimes that costs later, but that's OK by me.
Sam