Re: Out of VM idea

Rik van Riel (H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl)
Wed, 29 Apr 1998 07:19:51 +0200 (MET DST)

On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, George wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> >Following some observations from Michael Remski (sent
> >to me by private e-mail), I've come to the conlusion
> >that we really should do something about out-of-VM
> >situations.
>
> At the moment, (2.1.98), I can lock my 64 MB machine up with a 'make
> MAKE='make -j20' zImage'.
>
> At the time of memory death:
> * It has 4 megabytes of free pages.
> * It has 6 megabytes of buffer memory.
> * But it dies because it has 0 swap left.
>
> Those hard limits on memory how much memory to not grab should definitely
> go.

You can tune the buffermem & pagecache amount of memory
in /proc/sys/vm/{buffermem,pagecache}.
But why your system has 4 MB of free memory I really
don't know...
(it basically means that kswapd succeeded in it's
goals).

I probably should make a kswapd CPU limiter, so that
kswapd _can't_ use more than 50% of CPU time. This
will reduce the number of swapping deaths...

Rik.
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