Re: Test program with VM or FS problems

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Sat Dec 20 2003 - 11:03:17 EST


jlnance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Hello Andrew,
> About a year ago I told you I would get you some more information
> about a problem I was seeing that might be in the Linux VM or ext{2,3}
> code.

I thought you'd forgotten!

> For most of the run the temp file is smaller
> than this. So for most of the run both files will fit into the
> memory of the machine. Thus I would expect the program to run
> quickly, because it will not need to touch the disk. Things are
> in cache. This is not what I see. Instead the program seems to
> be very much disk bound.

I bet the use-once page replacement heuristic is doing the wrong thing. I
noticed it playing up once - the machine had 30M on the inactive list and
reading a 40M file repeatedly caused that file to never get cached. it
just kept on reclaiming itself.


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