From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751410AbWANNxq (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:53:46 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751431AbWANNxq (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:53:46 -0500 Received: from zproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.162.195]:39377 "EHLO zproxy.gmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751410AbWANNxp convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:53:45 -0500 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=Hf6Ec7amGTtx7rCQ4pFQrnSmMps+Elb04FNgj5k8pEnuCex8SAYuOgxHKU7B4ZWvG/TiB+YWkS6uJcWgC76/B5UXvg8P3Wwn5hkVUjIwobzuV4Mdv8cV1tOLJln87uV0UHL19D/Qn0iWK2PE4xTrmlj4dzjf1ttU///8yZujfxk= Message-ID: <3afbacad0601140553u374273bao71c0cb74108354d8@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 14:53:44 +0100 From: Jim MacBaine To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk Cc: Nick Craig-Wood In-Reply-To: <20060114110231.06B6F14C6FD@irishsea.home.craig-wood.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Content-Disposition: inline References: <5uzvD-8tr-19@gated-at.bofh.it> <20060114110231.06B6F14C6FD@irishsea.home.craig-wood.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 1/14/06, Nick Craig-Wood wrote: > On my home workstation I do a lot of stuff with very large video > files, so set swappiness to 0 some time ago so using these large files > would stop all the applications getting pushed out into swap. My motivation was similar: My desktop usually runs 24 hrs and I leave large applications which I use from time to time always open. Like OpenOffice, Firefox, Emacs with large buffers, etc. In the night, the machine performs two disk-intensive tasks. First a backup then updatedb. And every morning about 650 MB of 1 GB RAM is used for caches and all my application need to be swapped in before I can use them. Of course, the increase of disk cache is reasonable for those tasks, but honestly, I don't care whether the updatedb process takes 10 or 20 minutes in the night. But I do care if switching between applications needs >10 seconds in the morning. Would it be possible to trigger paging in specific applications from userspace? So I might run something like echo -n firefox-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in echo -n soffice-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in ... after my nightly cron jobs have filled the memory with disk cache data that won't be useful anymore, because in my daily work I rarely touch 10% of the filesystem. Regards, Jim