From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261699AbTJ2Wa4 (ORCPT ); Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:30:56 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261705AbTJ2Wa4 (ORCPT ); Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:30:56 -0500 Received: from cmailm5.svr.pol.co.uk ([195.92.193.21]:29454 "EHLO cmailm5.svr.pol.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261699AbTJ2Way (ORCPT ); Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:30:54 -0500 From: Chris Vine To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: 2.6.0-test9 - poor swap performance on low end machines Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 22:30:12 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200310292230.12304.chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, I have been testing the 2.6.0-test9 kernel on a couple of desktop machines. On the first, a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 uniprocessor with 512MHz of RAM, it seems to perform fine, and on various compilation tests, compile times for the test programs I have compiled are pretty much the same as those obtained with a stock 2.4.22 kernel, and the 2.6 kernel seems to be slightly more responsive on the desktop. Nothing I use it for knocks it substantially into swap. However, on a low end machine (200MHz Pentium MMX uniprocessor with only 32MB of RAM and 70MB of swap) I get poor performance once extensive use is made of the swap space. On a test compile of a C++ program involving quite a lot of templates and therefore which is quite memory intensive, it chugs along with the stock 2.4.22 kernel and completes the compile in about 10 minutes going (at its worst) into about 34MB of swap. However, doing the same compile on the 2.6.0-test9 kernel, it reaches about 22MB into swap and then goes into some kind of swap frenzy, continuously swaping and unswapping. Even after leaving it for an hour it continuously swaps and unswaps and fails to compile even the first file (which takes about 2 minutes using the 2.4.22 kernel) and sticks at about 24MB of swap. The kernel is compiled with gcc-2.95.3. Chris. PS Please copy any replies to my e-mail address.