Re: swapping and the value of /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

[Con Kolivas]

Marcelo Tosatti writes:

> On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 09:34:20AM +1000, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > Andrew Morton writes:
> >
> > >Con Kolivas <kernel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> A scan of the change logs for swappiness related changes shows nothing 
> > >>that > might explain these changes.  My question is:  "Is this change in 
> > >> behavior
> > >> > deliberate, or just a side effect of other changes that were made in 
> > >> the vm?" > and "What kind of swappiness behavior might I expect to find 
> > >> in future kernels?".
> > >>
> > >> The change was not deliberate but there have been some other people 
> > >> report significant changes in the swappiness behaviour as well (see 
> > >> archives). It has usually been of the increased swapping variety lately. 
> > >> It has been annoying enough to the bleeding edge desktop users for a 
> > >> swag of out-of-tree hacks to start appearing (like mine).
> > >
> > >All of which is largely wasted effort.  It would be much more useful to get
> > >down and identify which patch actually caused the behavioural change.
> >
> > I don't disagree. Is there anyone who has the time and is willing to do the 
> > regression testing? This is a general appeal to the mailing list.
>
> Hi kernel fellows,
>
> I volunteer. I'll try something tomorrow to compare swappiness of older kernels like  
> 2.6.5 and 2.6.6, which were fine on SGI's Altix tests, up to current newer kernels 
> (on small memory boxes of course).
>
> Someone needs to write a vmstat-like tool to parse /proc/vmstat. 
> The statistics in there allows us to watch the behaviour of VM
> page reclaim code.
>
> Con, if you could compile a list of reports we would be very grateful.

Apart from lots of "soft" reports I've been getting, the most obvious one 
recently on the mailing list is this: 

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109237941331221&w=2

and no, I'm not referring to this thread because he tried one of my patches; 
that's an old patch that I'm not even pushing any more.

Cheers,
Con

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