2.6.6-1.435: kswapd clears out cache?

Mike Fedyk mfedyk at matchmail.com
Mon Jun 28 20:01:20 UTC 2004


Philip Molter wrote:
> I have a box I recently updated to kernel 2.6.6-1.435 from 2.6.5-1.358. 
>  This box has no swap and 4GB of memory.  Normally, when it runs, about 
> 2.5GB of that memory is consumed by file cache.  This is the desired 
> behavior.  After upgrading to 2.6.6-1.435, at least once every five 
> minutes, kswapd runs and completely wipes out the file cache.  It's not 
> caching other information, it's just completely clearing it out so the 
> box has about 2.5GB of memory free.  This isn't desired, because then 
> all the stuff that was cached needs to be re-cached, pegging I/O on the 
> box and killing performance of our application.

What type of workload does your application produce?

Are you mounting and unmounting drives all of the time?  That can show 
the behaviour you're describing... Maybe you don't want the automounter 
turned on on your server.  Maybe you just need to set a longer timeout...

Mike





More information about the fedora-list mailing list