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LKML: Jim MacBaine: Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title>LKML: Jim MacBaine: Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk</title><link href="/css/message.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /><link href="/css/wrap.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" title="wrap" /><link href="/css/nowrap.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="nowrap" /><link href="/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" /><script src="/js/simple-calendar.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="/js/styleswitcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="lkml.org : last 100 messages" href="/rss.php" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="lkml.org : last messages by Jim MacBaine" href="/groupie.php?aid=7249" /><!--Matomo--><script> var _paq = window._paq = window._paq || []; /* tracker methods like "setCustomDimension" should be called before "trackPageView" */ _paq.push(["setDoNotTrack", true]); _paq.push(["disableCookies"]); _paq.push(['trackPageView']); _paq.push(['enableLinkTracking']); (function() { var u="//m.lkml.org/"; _paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', u+'matomo.php']); _paq.push(['setSiteId', '1']); var d=document, g=d.createElement('script'), s=d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; g.async=true; g.src=u+'matomo.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(g,s); })(); </script><!--End Matomo Code--></head><body onload="es.jasper.simpleCalendar.init();" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="180" align="center"><a href="/"><img style="border:0;width:135px;height:32px" src="/images/toprowlk.gif" alt="lkml.org" /></a></td><td width="32">聽</td><td class="nb"><div><a class="nb" href="/lkml"> [lkml]</a> 聽 <a class="nb" href="/lkml/2006"> [2006]</a> 聽 <a class="nb" href="/lkml/2006/1"> [Jan]</a> 聽 <a class="nb" href="/lkml/2006/1/14"> [14]</a> 聽 <a class="nb" href="/lkml/last100"> [last100]</a> 聽 <a href="/rss.php"><img src="/images/rss-or.gif" border="0" alt="RSS Feed" /></a></div><div>Views: <a href="#" class="nowrap" onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('wrap');return false;">[wrap]</a><a href="#" class="wrap" onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('nowrap');return false;">[no wrap]</a> 聽 <a class="nb" href="/lkml/mheaders/2006/1/14/107" onclick="this.href='/lkml/headers'+'/2006/1/14/107';">[headers]</a>聽 <a href="/lkml/bounce/2006/1/14/107">[forward]</a>聽 </div></td><td width="32">聽</td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="es-jasper-simpleCalendar" baseurl="/lkml/"></div><div class="threadlist">Messages in this thread</div><ul class="threadlist"><li class="root"><a href="/lkml/2006/1/14/59">First message in thread</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2006/1/14/59">(Nick Craig-Wood)</a><ul><li class="origin"><a href="/lkml/2006/1/14/143">Jim MacBaine</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2006/1/14/143">Denis Vlasenko</a></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul></td><td width="32" rowspan="2" class="c" valign="top"><img src="/images/icornerl.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="/" /></td><td class="c" rowspan="2" valign="top" style="padding-top: 1em"><table><tr><td><table><tr><td class="lp">Date</td><td class="rp" itemprop="datePublished">Sat, 14 Jan 2006 14:53:44 +0100</td></tr><tr><td class="lp">From</td><td class="rp" itemprop="author">Jim MacBaine <></td></tr><tr><td class="lp">Subject</td><td class="rp" itemprop="name">Re: /proc/sys/vm/swappiness == 0 makes OOM killer go beserk</td></tr></table></td><td></td></tr></table><pre itemprop="articleBody">On 1/14/06, Nick Craig-Wood <nick@craig-wood.com> wrote:<br /><br />> On my home workstation I do a lot of stuff with very large video<br />> files, so set swappiness to 0 some time ago so using these large files<br />> would stop all the applications getting pushed out into swap.<br /><br />My motivation was similar: My desktop usually runs 24 hrs and I leave<br />large applications which I use from time to time always open. Like<br />OpenOffice, Firefox, Emacs with large buffers, etc. In the night, the<br />machine performs two disk-intensive tasks. First a backup then<br />updatedb. And every morning about 650 MB of 1 GB RAM is used for<br />caches and all my application need to be swapped in before I can use<br />them.<br /><br />Of course, the increase of disk cache is reasonable for those tasks,<br />but honestly, I don't care whether the updatedb process takes 10 or 20<br />minutes in the night. But I do care if switching between applications<br />needs >10 seconds in the morning.<br /><br />Would it be possible to trigger paging in specific applications from<br />userspace? So I might run something like<br /><br />echo -n firefox-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in<br />echo -n soffice-bin > /proc/sys/vm/page-in<br />...<br /><br />after my nightly cron jobs have filled the memory with disk cache data<br />that won't be useful anymore, because in my daily work I rarely touch<br />10% of the filesystem.<br /><br />Regards,<br />Jim<br />-<br />To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in<br />the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org<br />More majordomo info at <a href="http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html">http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html</a><br />Please read the FAQ at <a href="http://www.tux.org/lkml/">http://www.tux.org/lkml/</a><br /><br /></pre></td><td width="32" rowspan="2" class="c" valign="top"><img src="/images/icornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom"> 聽 </td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom">聽</td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerl.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td><td class="c">聽</td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="/" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top" colspan="2"> 聽 </td><td class="lm">Last update: 2006-01-14 14:56 聽聽 [from the cache]<br />漏2003-2020 <a href="http://blog.jasper.es/"><span itemprop="editor">Jasper Spaans</span></a>|hosted at <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=9a8e99d24cf9">Digital Ocean</a> and my Meterkast|<a href="http://blog.jasper.es/categories.html#lkml-ref">Read the blog</a></td><td>聽</td></tr></table><script language="javascript" src="/js/styleswitcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script></body></html>