Re: dead mem pages

Rik van Riel (riel@conectiva.com.br)
Tue, 10 Jul 2001 20:27:15 -0300 (BRST)


On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Dirk Wetter wrote:

> > It would be good to know what these 2.8GB of cached pages are.
>
> believe me, i would like to know too where all the $$$ memory
> went to. ;-)

Most likely swap cache, that means it is the memory from your
simulations, just removed from the page tables and put in the
swap cache.

> > Again on a general note, the 2.4 kernel's VM is new and hence not fully
> > mature. So the short and unhelpful answer to your query is probably that
> > the current VM system is not well tuned for your workload (4.3GB of memory
> > hungry simulations on a 4GB machine).
>
> concerning the maturity that's also the answer i got from the kernel
> guru's at last USENIX in boston. but ihmo it *should* become soon
> better for the future if Linux intends to become bigger in the server
> business. (my $0.02)

It'll get better as soon as we have the time, for 2.4.7
the VM statistics have already improved a bit so people
are no longer fooled by large "cached" figures ;)

Actual improvements to the code, if needed at all, will
come with time ... more than $0.02 will get you ;)

regards,

Rik

--
Virtual memory is like a game you can't win;
However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

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