[CentOS] CentOS 3 vs. CentOS 4 Memory Utilization

[William Warren]

yes i did.  The 2.4x Rh kernels actually aren't right in their swapping 
behavior.  it really nailed my samba server here at the house and caused 
massive swapping and load issues on a friend's gaming server.  i don't 
know what it is about RH's 2.4x kernels but they swap and won't give the 
cache memory back.  I have more than 6 ipcop firewalls based on 2.4 
kernels(not RH) and they won't swap unless you actually exhaust physical 
memory.  The issue is the RH 2.4x kernels which for some reason continue 
to swap even with 500 MEGS of cache memory available to take back.  2.6x 
runs much better and actually obeys the swappiness commands.  Even the 
various patches done by Rh on the 2.4x kernel never reduces this behavior.

Les Mikesell wrote:
> William Warren wrote:
>> i moved away from Red Hat 2.4x kernels as they have an annoying 
>> tendency to swap instead of giving back cache.  I moved to Centos-4 
>> and i have vm.swappiness to zero and am using at most 144K of swap 
>> across 5 machines.
> 
> Did you see any real-world improvement from this?  The kernel may be 
> right in swapping out little-used parts of memory to release RAM for 
> something more likely to be active.
> 

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