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Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:03:37 +0100
From: Roger Luethi <rl@hellgate.ch>
To: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>,
       wli@holomorphy.com, kernel@kolivas.org, chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, mbligh@aracnet.com
Subject: Re: 2.6.0-test9 - poor swap performance on low end machines
Message-ID: <20031217110336.GA5615@k3.hellgate.ch>
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References: <20031216112307.GA5041@k3.hellgate.ch> <Pine.LNX.4.44.0312161126520.19925-100000@chimarrao.boston.redhat.com>
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On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:29:50 -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Roger Luethi wrote:
> 
> > One potential problem with the benchmarks is that my test box has
> > just one bar with 256 MB RAM. The kbuild and efax tests were run with
> > mem=64M and mem=32M, respectively. If the difference between mem=32M
> > and a real 32 MB machine is significant for the benchmark,
> 
> Could you try "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/lower_zone_protection" ?

Defaults to 0 anyway, doesn't it? Turning it _on_ seems to slow
benchmarks down somewhat (< 5%). In one of ten runs, though, the efax
test stopped doing anything for ten minutes -- no disk activity, no
progress whatsoever.

Roger