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. The previous kernel did >>exhibit 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. > > > 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. 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. 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 :-) Sam -- Sam W.Drinkard -- sam at wa4phy.net http://wa4phy.net Augusta Area Mesonet cell 706.825.8513 Home 706.868.7253 MAIL 4428 Branchwood Drive, Martinez Georgia, 30907-1304