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Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 12:28:31 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>
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To: Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy@karlsbakk.net>
CC: "Martin J. Bligh" <Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [BUG] 2.4 VM sucks. Again
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Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> 
> > > I don't think Andrew is ready to submit this yet ... before anything
> > > gets merged back, it'd be very worthwhile testing the relative
> > > performance of both solutions ... the more testers we have the
> > > better ;-)
> >
> > Cripes no.  It's pretty experimental.  Andrea spotted a bug, too.  Fixed
> > version is below.
> 
> Works great! This should _definetely_ be merged into the main kernel after
> som testing. Without it _all_ other kernels I've tested (2.4.lots) goes OOM
> under the mentioned scenarios. This one simply does the job.

I suspect nuke-buffers is simply always the right thing to do.  It's
what 2.5 is doing now (effectively).  We'll see...

But in your case, you only have a couple of gigs of memory, iirc.
You shouldn't be running into catastrophic buffer_head congestion.
Something odd is happening.

If you can provide a really detailed set of steps which can be
used by others to reproduce this, that would really help.

-