Date: Sun, 05 Apr 1998 18:23:46 -0400 From: Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz@druber.com> To: dyson@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: dg@root.com, dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: swap-leak in 2.2.5 ? Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980405182346.00926c80@mail.kersur.net> In-Reply-To: <199804052135.QAA00680@dyson.iquest.net> References: <3.0.5.32.19980405172640.00915e30@mail.kersur.net>
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At 04:35 PM 4/5/98 -0500, John S. Dyson wrote: >Dan Swartzendruber said: >> >> My only quibble with this technique is that it would seem to make it >> harder to tell if your machine is really running low on swap or not >> (e.g. swap as backing store for stack/heap/whatever *is* critical and >> allocation failure can cause application failure, whereas swap being >> used to cache random cruft is in the "who really cares" department). >> Or is there some way to tell the difference? >> >It is difficult not only to tell if you are low on swap, but also it >is hard to quantify being low on memory. I have been thinking about >this over the last year or so. Here's an off-the-cuff idea: since the confusing usage of swap as a caching mechanism is only a performance optimization, how bogus would it be to not report it. Lie. If my workstation has 64MB of swap set up, 8 of which is being used for real backing store, and 12 of which is being used to cache filesystem pages, have swapinfo lie and report only 8MB in use. Possibly add a flag to swapinfo to report both kinds of usage (granted this makes it necessary for track what a given swap block is used for, but...) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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