Re: bdflush or others affecting disk cache
On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 09:31, Jason Lim wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been banging my head on this one for a while now on a 2.4.20 system.
[...]
> The problem is that swap usage can grow to 100Mb... yet the buffers and
> cache remain at astoundingly high levels.
>
> I can actually see memory to cache and buffers increasing and at the same
> time see it increasing swap usage!
>
> What I don't get is why the system... with about 700Mb in cache and 70Mb
> in buffers, is using swap space at all.
[...]
Because it's more efficient to use swap space to hold stuff from RAM
that is not currently being used.
Linux will happily shift process memory into swap to make more room for
buffers. Why keep 100M worth of not-currently-active daemon in RAM when
there is a process trying to buffer the whole disk?
> Wouldn't it be far, FAR faster for the system to reduce the cache by about
> 100Mb or so instead of swapping that 100Mb to disk? And note that the swap
No. It is faster to use that memory for buffers if the system is being
disk bound.
> usage is constantly fluctuating, so you can see the performance problem
> this is causing. Any ideas?!
The VM management code in Linux is something that is constantly getting
tweaked and re-written. 2.4.20 is quite old now, and it wouldn't
surprise me if the current 2.4.26 kernel has had the VM significantly
improved since then.
The performance hits you are seeing are probably because a process is
walking through the disk. The 2.4.20 VM system may not be handling it as
gracefully as it could, but I bet there is a process doing heaps of disk
reads that is triggering it.
--
Donovan Baarda <abo@minkirri.apana.org.au>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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