Re: [patch] my latest oom stuff

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sat, 24 Oct 1998 21:06:42 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Billy Harvey wrote:
>
> Linus, FWIW in a non-measured case, I've noticed the kswapd
> occassionally take 90% CPU (with top) if I run without any swap (144M
> RAM), but if I add 128M swap, I never see it. In fact, with the swap
> active, it hardly ever gets used, but seems to really affect the system
> with none available.

Yes.

The thing is, that without any swap-space at all you really cut down on
the options the system has. It's not that the kernel _has_ to have
swap-space, but without any swap-space it ends up doing essentially the
same work it does when it _has_ swap-space, but now 90% of it ends up
being wasted.

Another way of saying this it that the remaining 10% of it has to work ten
times as hard to get the same results.

Linus

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