excessive swapping

[Florin Andrei]

I am running 2.6.8-rc4 with Ingo's voluntary preempt patch O5, on Fedora
2.
I'm using the default Gnome environment, reading mail with Evolution,
browsing with Firefox, etc. I've 512MB of RAM.

At the same time, i'm processing some DVDs that i made - i'm extracting
titles from a DVD to a dedicated hard-drive, saving audio and video
tracks, etc with transcode-0.6.12 ( http://www.transcoding.org ). All
that means reading/writing from/to large files on /dev/dvd and /dev/hde
at high speeds.

The system is swapping excessively. There's no way the total size of the
applications exceeds the size of RAM. There's plenty of room to spare,
yet 16% of the 530MB of swap is used.
The system's responsiveness as a desktop is very poor. If i touch an
application, the drive thrashes raising it from the dead^H^H^H^H swap.

With the Fedora 2 kernel, this never happens. I did exactly the same
things, and there was no excessive swapping. The system feels very
responsive and fast.

I'll try to add Con Kolivas' hard swappiness patch to my customized
kernel and see if that improves things.

In any case, the current behaviour is unacceptable.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

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