Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4393 mails)

[John McNulty <john@xxxxxxxx>]

Why don't you have a go at tuning it to see if you can get better results. 
Have a read of /usr/src/linux-2.4.4.SuSE/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt or 
whatever the fully qualified path is on your version.   This will tell you 
what tunable options exist in /proc/sys/vm and what they are used for.

The one thing I don't like about the swapon command on Linux is that it 
doesn't distinguish between swap used and swap reserved.   what you may be 
seeing is reserved swap - which is basicly swap allocated for use 'just in 
case' the program that asked for it, needs it.    Is your increase in swap 
usage actually showing up as swap out I/O operations when monitored by
vmstat?

If not, then I pressume that this is reserved swap, in which case it's not 
going to have any impact on system performance as real program data is not 
actually getting swapped out at all.  According to the above document, 
"overcommit_memory" is the default behaviour, so setting it to 1 to turn it 
off (sometimes called lazy swap) should stop reserved swap allocation from 
being registered as used swap by the swapon command.


On Friday 02 November 2001 2:22 am, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
> Do we have an ETA on the fixes for the VM problem that was said to be
> fixed in 2.4.14pre6.. I just watched 38M of swap get eaten for no
> apparent reason?
>
> Thanks.
>
> -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====-----
> Ben Rosenberg            mailto:ben@xxxxxxxxx
> -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====-----
> "Technological progress is like an axe in the
>  hands of a pathological criminal" -AE