Re: 2.4.5 VM

[Christopher Zimmerman]

"Trever L. Adams" wrote:

> In my opinion 2.4.x is NOT ready for primetime.  The VM has been getting
> worse since 2.4.0, I believe.  Definitely since and including 2.4.3.  I
> cannot even edit a few images in gimp where the entire working set used
> to fit entirely in memory.  The system now locks in some loop (SAK still
> works).
>
> FILE CACHING IS BROKEN.  I don't care who says what, by the time swap is
> half filled, it is time to start throwing away simple caches.  Not wait
> until there is no more memory free and then lock in an infinite loop.
>
> My system has 128 Meg of Swap and RAM.
>
> Trever Adams
>
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I've found that with the latest kernel release (2.4.5) VM performance has
been greatly improved.  kswapd and bdflush no longer use 200% of my cpu
cycles when simply doing a dd bs=1024 count=8388608 if=/dev/zero
of=test.file.  All of my test systems remain responsive with about 180% cpu
available.  These systems are running software RAID and 3ware IDE raid with
2GB of memory and 4GB swap.  Have you tried 2.4.5?

-zim

Christopher Zimmerman
AltaVista Company