From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from prefetch-atm.san.rr.com (root@ns1.san.rr.com [204.210.0.2]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id BAA09801 for ; Sat, 9 Jan 1999 01:40:50 -0500 Message-ID: <369709CF.E38FEE6F@ucsd.edu> Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 23:48:31 -0800 From: Benjamin Redelings I MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: 2.2.0-pre[56] swap performance poor with > 1 thrashing task References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Dax Kelson Cc: Zlatko Calusic , Linus Torvalds , Steve Bergman , Andrea Arcangeli , brent verner , "Garst R. Reese" , Kalle Andersson , Ben McCann , linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-mm@kvack.org, Alan Cox , "Stephen C. Tweedie" List-ID: Maybe this is not really a problem with swapping, but more with concurrent I/O in general, because I KNOW that running low-priority niced jobs in the background (e.g. updatedb) can seriously degrade performance of tasks in the foreground (e.g. netscape) that are doing a minimal amount of I/O. I think I've seen a few people mention this in the past also. In any case, I've kind of assumed that that was the way it is supposed to be. Perhaps it is just that IDE drives really don't like writing 2 files at once. Or that the background task does a lot of I/O, and the clustering algorithm makes sure it all gets written before anything else happens. Anyway, I bet those explanations are wrong, but maybe there is another explanation.... I don't know. Ah. So Zlatko has a patch. I look forward to it, and hope it improves performance of non-swapping applications also. -benRI -- I don't need education. I don't need ANY education. I don't need NO education. Benjamin Redelings I <>< http://sdcc13.ucsd.edu/~bredelin -- This is a majordomo managed list. To unsubscribe, send a message with the body 'unsubscribe linux-mm me@address' to: majordomo@kvack.org