2.4.21-rc1 VM swaps out too much

[Rene Rebe <rene.rebe@gmx.net>]

Hi all,

somewhere in the 2.4.21-xx series (currently running -rc1 here) seems
to be a VM regression, that results in quite hefty swap-outs. The box
is an Athlon-XP with 512MB RAM, running batched gcc jobs (distribution
builds taking three days and more...). But the box is used a normal
workstation, too. My normal desktop programs constantly need to get
swapped-in - quite annoying. This only start to happen after an uptime
of a day.

So the CPU:

vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 6
model           : 6
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 4 Processor
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1460.481
cache size      : 256 KB

$ cat /proc/meminfo
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  527351808 519213056  8138752        0 88793088 328437760
Swap: 537214976 184963072 352251904
MemTotal:       514992 kB
MemFree:          7948 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:         86712 kB
Cached:         252328 kB
SwapCached:      68412 kB
Active:         276828 kB
Inactive:       177468 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       514992 kB
LowFree:          7948 kB
SwapTotal:      524624 kB
SwapFree:       343996 kB

$ uptime
 21:52:41 up 4 days, 23:55,  4 users,  load average: 2.14, 2.47, 2.32

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.21-rc1 (root@jackson) (gcc version 3.2.2) #1 Mon Apr 28 00:36:17 CEST 2003

More data available on request.

- René

--  
René Rebe - Europe/Germany/Berlin
e-mail:   rene@rocklinux.org, rene.rebe@gmx.net
web:      http://www.rocklinux.org/people/rene http://gsmp.tfh-berlin.de/rene/

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