> Well, I booted my 64Mb, UP PPro with mem=6M and then mem=8M
> to see how it worked. My IDE hard disk gets about 3.8 Mb/s max (as
> recorded by hdparm) and I have a 34M swap partition on it.
Now that's a cool setup :)
> In 6M, I actually got to an xterm, but it was paging every
> keystroke, so I quickly (actually, it was NOT very quick :) rebooted
> into mem=8M, which was a lot better. I could us xterm in 8Mb, and I
> could use emacs at the same time. The write cache remained quite
> small... I didn't really do much writing though.
Well yes, Emacs is quite large. What was the name again?
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping?
> The main problem was that about 1/2 the RAM was filled with
> page cache. Now, since "1/2 the RAM" was only 3.0 - 3.5 Mb, the
> stuff in the page cache may have been worth swapping out large parts
> of emacs, xterm, and the X-server. Perhaps there are some
> statistics in /proc that tell the hit rate in the page cache. I'll
> go take a look in the Documentation/....
Data that is swap-cached is also (erroneously?) reported as
page cache. I think we should either change the code or the
documentation... Opinions?
> I would think that this wouldn't happen, because state
> should always be set to 0 in do_try_to_free_pages.
If all the pages in the page cache are touched, kswapd will
quickly set the state to something else. You should probably
consider yourself lucky that it did :)
cheers,
Rik -- the flu hits, the flu hits, the flu hits -- MORE
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Linux memory management tour guide. H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl |
| Scouting Vries cubscout leader. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/ |
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