Re: Bug? in 2.4 memory management...

[Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@conectiva.com.br>]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, José Manuel Román Ramírez wrote:

> Hi,
> I think we've 'discovered' a bug regarding the kernel 2.4.2-ac11 (and maybe 
> other) and the memory management. It seems that the cached memory sometimes 
> is not freed as more memory is required. 
> 
> The system where we have detected the problem was an athlon 1ghz, 1.2gb of 
> ram, and a swapfile of 2gb.
> 
> When we run a program that requires/uses 1ghz of memory, and we kill it, all 
> (or nearly all) the memory is used by the cache, as we load a hugue file. The 
> next time we run the program, it seems like the kernel can't use the cached 
> memory and the memory we need is taken from the swap. Note however that when 
> we set a swap partition smaller than the memory required, let's say 128mb, 
> the problem disappears as the cache memory is used instead the swap...
> 
> So, what's wrong? Thanks in advance!

VM balance is not quite right. 

Could you please try ac12 (which has a patch to tune the VM a bit) and
report results?

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