Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (449 mails)

[Joe Landman <landman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

No, it was a cut and paste.  I will go back and look.  The "cache" line 
is not buffer cache then, but program page and data cache?

I have been playing a bit with the /proc/sys/vm/ stuff.

I am wondering if it is time to move this to 2.6. 

Joe

Andi Kleen wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 09:28:04AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
>  
>
> >  I have an application I am running which wants to use as much memory 
> > as possible.  I have a quad 848 with 32 GB ram onn it.  It has been 
> > running for a while with an RSS of 15GB, and a total memory size of 
> > 19GB.  This leaves well over 11 GB for the cache and the os.  Sure 
> > enouch, using the atop tool, and the vmstat tool, I see cache at 
> > 15068336k, free mem at 10432k, and it is swaped out to the maximum 
> >    
>
> The "cache" is your program. free mem indeed sounds a bit high (you
> sure it isn't a typo?)
>
>  
>
> > What else can I do?  I would like to be able to use 3/4 of the ram of 
> > the machine for applications, and not have 4 GB of swapped pages when I 
> > have 15 GB of disk cache.  I understand the need for disk cache, but 
> > paging to disk, and filling up swap space in this particular scenario 
> > makes no sense whatsoever.
> >    
>
> There are various VM tunables in /proc/sys/vm.  Play with them. 
>
> However I have tested similar configurations in the past and it definitely
> didn't show such behaviour as you're describing. A single process
> was usually able to fill up near all of memory in the default
> configuration, although the VM would do constant aging of pages
> would cost a bit of CPU time. This can be tuned however.
>
> -Andi
>  

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