Perhaps Apache doesn't benefit from madvise. It reads
sequentially a lot of files that are each much smaller
than RAM and it is quite likely to need the file again in
the near future. This is a very normal Unix load and the
sort of thing we should optimise Linux to work well with
all the time.
However there are still applications that need madvise. These
are files that are
1) read or written in an unusual order
2) bigger than RAM
3) only read a few times before being destroyed
The only one of these we can (and probably should) guess at with
heuristics is the file size/RAM relationship. The others require
madvise/fadvise.
-- Erik Corry- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu