Re: Autotune swappiness01

From: Con Kolivas
Date: Mon Jul 26 2004 - 06:04:31 EST


R. J. Wysocki wrote:
On Monday 26 of July 2004 12:29, Con Kolivas wrote:

R. J. Wysocki wrote:

On Monday 26 of July 2004 11:31, Con Kolivas wrote:

R. J. Wysocki wrote:

On Monday 26 of July 2004 03:09, Con Kolivas wrote:

Con Kolivas writes:

Andrew Morton writes:

Seriously, we've seen placebo effects before...

I am in full agreement there... It's easy to see that applications do
not swap out overnight; but i'm having difficulty trying to find a way
to demonstrate the other part. I guess timing the "linking the kernel
with full debug" on a low memory box is measurable.

I should have said - finding a swappiness that ensures not swapping out
applications with updatedb, then using that same swappiness value to do
the linking test.

Please excuse me, but is that viable at all? IMHO, it's just like
trying to tune a radio including volume with only one knob. I don't
say it won't work, but the probability that it will is rather small, it
seems ...

Well that's what we want. I cant remember other desktop operating
systems setting a root only control between night and day, or between
copying ISOs and running applications or...

I agree, but isn't it related to the fact that other desktop OSes usually
don't run anything like updatedb nightly?

Perhaps we need a bit more sophisticated swap algorithm than other OSes
do. For example, couldn't we add an additional parameter to control the
swapping "behavior", apart from the swappiness? Something like adding
the second knob in my radio example? Just thinking,

I think one knob is one knob too many already.


Can you please tell me why do you think so?

If you wanna discuss pedantics...

In my ideal, nonsensical, impossible to obtain world we have an autoregulating operating system that doesn't need any knobs.

Con

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