Re: strange swap behaviour - test11pre4

[Craig Schlenter]

[snip, vmstat stuff, me]
> There is a perl program running (80 Meg's in size, 20 Megs resident) that is
> chatting to a database and building up a large hash in memory. The machine has
> 64M of RAM. The bit that doesn't make sense is why the cache is so large -
> the VM seems to have got stuck paging in stuff from swap repeatedly (bits of
> the perl program it would seem). Surely it should shrink the cache to provide 
> more breathing room or am I being an idiot about this?

$idiot++;

> Should I be running a different kernel? 2.2.19preXXX ? Should I be tuning
> vm things in proc and if so how?

Hmmmm ... I think more RAM will help. I was hoping that it was some
VM problem but having tested 2.2.19pre5 now (which does seem 'better' -
it keeps about 45M of the program resident) it seems as if program 
really is keen on actually using most of the 80Megs it has allocated
... sheesh ... it makes mozilla look lean.

My apologies for the noise ...

--Craig