Re: 2.4.10aa1 (00_vm-tweaks-1)

[Adrian Bunk]

On Sun, 23 Sep 2001, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> If you are interested about the VM behaviour under swap (and non) please
> test the 00_vm-tweaks-1 (can be applied to plain 2.4.10), here the swap
> behaviour seems improved with it. Thanks!
>...

2.4.10 seems to behave worse than kernels up to 2.4.9 and 2.4.9ac12
(haven't tried above) with the following workload (everything is only a
subjective impression as a user; I don't look at how long the "rm" and the
"tar" take because that's not very important for me):

FVWM with 6 open xterms is running
XMMS is running

mv linux linux.old
nice rm -rf linux.old &
tar xzf linux-2.4.10.tar.gz &
lynx ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/testing

up to 2.4.9 and 2.4.9ac12:
everything works fine

2.4.10:
interactive use of the machine is very bad, I can't type a command in
another xterm

2.4.10 + 00_vm-tweaks-1:
interactive use of the machine works all right, but XMMS does sometimes
stutter

This is on a K6 with 300 Mhz. free in 2.4.10 + 00_vm-tweaks-1 gives the
following output:

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         62252      60400       1852          0       2408      32792
-/+ buffers/cache:      25200      37052
Swap:       947824      10264     937560
$

My impression is that there's a problem when several processes do heavy
non-cachable disk IO.

cu
Adrian

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