Re: How do I make this thing stop laging? Reboot? Sounds

[Mike Galbraith]

At 01:02 PM 6/18/2003 +0200, Helge Hafting wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:30:48PM +0400, Yaroslav Rastrigin wrote:
>[...]
> > Well, the problem is probably unsolvable on kernel level (kernel is 
> unaware of
> > user's habits in app/mem usage), but I think it's pretty solvable on user
> > level - give us a knob to tune VM's behavior. We mere mortals often know
> > better how we will use our system's memory, and which apps we will be
> > running.
>
>There are some knobs.  There's the mlock call that disables
>paging for whatever memory you want.
>
>xmms could easily stop skipping if it mlocks its own code
>and data.  Running it at elevated priority might also
>be a good idea, so cpu hogs don't starve it.

Unless it's having trouble getting music into ram fast enough.  It doesn't 
skip here unless I'm pushing hard on the pagecache.

>Both of these needs root pribileges, or at least a suid
>binary.  (The priority stuff _can_ be done without extra
>privileges by nicing every _other_ process instead.)
>
> > I, for myself, like laptop-mode patch (basically, it groups disk
> > writes to do them once in 5-10 minutes, thus allowing hdd to sleep a lot)
> > very much - when I'm on AC, most probably I'm in office , and turning 
> it off
> > is reasonable. When I'm on battery, though, chances are I won't be 
> compiling
> > the kernel and/or do other heavy disk IO, instead, I most likely will be
> > coding, so echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode seems appropriate, 
> reasonable and
> > useful.
> > Could something like this be done with VM/swap policy ?
> >
>Sure.  Take a look at /proc/sys/vm/swappiness for example.
>More stuff like this can be made - by those interested.
>
>The original poster also fixed the problems by doing
>swapoff -a ; swapon -a...

I don't understand that.  Here, I can swap heftily and not skip.

         -Mike