[PLUG] Question About Linux Behavior

Dan Young danielmyoung at gmail.com
Tue Mar 21 04:52:43 UTC 2006


On 3/20/06, fh hillsboro <linux at frankhunt.com> wrote:
> Russell Senior wrote:
> >>>>>> "fh" == fh hillsboro <linux at frankhunt.com> writes:
> >>>>>>
> >
> > fh> [...] When I get back from $tarbuck$ and user activity resumes,
> > fh> there is significant latency while the disk beats it's brains out
> > fh> reloading everything back into memory (like 20-30 seconds for
> > fh> thunderbird to get it's brains back, for instance).  Is there any
> > fh> way to keep the applications from being swapped out in favor of
> > fh> (what I am assuming is) the disk cache?
> >
> > Turn off swap?  E.g.:
> >
> >   # swapoff -a
>
> Just a guess, but I suspect dire consequences if I did that.

Depends on how much RAM you have, how much stuff you have in memory,
and what the OOM-killer wants to whack first.

You could try tuning the kernel's "swappiness" value:
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

--
Dan Young



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