Re: 2.4.6-pre2, pre3 VM Behavior

Roger Larsson (roger.larsson@norran.net)
Thu, 14 Jun 2001 22:23:44 +0200


On Thursday 14 June 2001 10:47, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Thursday 14 June 2001 05:16, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Tom Sightler wrote:
> > > Quoting Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>:
> > > > After the initial burst, the system should stabilise,
> > > > starting the writeout of pages before we run low on
> > > > memory. How to handle the initial burst is something
> > > > I haven't figured out yet ... ;)
> > >
> > > Well, at least I know that this is expected with the VM, although I do
> > > still think this is bad behavior. If my disk is idle why would I wait
> > > until I have greater than 100MB of data to write before I finally
> > > start actually moving some data to disk?
> >
> > The file _could_ be a temporary file, which gets removed
> > before we'd get around to writing it to disk. Sure, the
> > chances of this happening with a single file are close to
> > zero, but having 100MB from 200 different temp files on a
> > shell server isn't unreasonable to expect.
>
> This still doesn't make sense if the disk bandwidth isn't being used.
>

It does if you are running on a laptop. Then you do not want the pages
go out all the time. Disk has gone too sleep, needs to start to write a few
pages, stays idle for a while, goes to sleep, a few more pages, ...

/RogerL

-- 
Roger Larsson
Skellefteċ
Sweden

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