From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758850AbYEIJtd (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 May 2008 05:49:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752875AbYEIJt0 (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 May 2008 05:49:26 -0400 Received: from minas.ics.muni.cz ([147.251.4.40]:40991 "EHLO minas.ics.muni.cz" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752424AbYEIJtY (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 May 2008 05:49:24 -0400 Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 11:49:22 +0200 From: Lukas Hejtmanek To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: jirislaby@gmail.com Subject: Swapping in 2.6.26-rc1 oddities (but it is omnipresent bug) Message-ID: <20080509094922.GJ31771@ics.muni.cz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-echelon: NSA, CIA, CI5, MI5, FBI, KGB, BIS, Plutonium, Bin Laden, bomb User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17+20080114 (2008-01-14) X-Muni-Spam-TestIP: 147.251.3.109 X-Muni-Envelope-From: xhejtman@anubis.ics.muni.cz X-Muni-Virus-Test: Clean X-Greylist: Sender succeeded SMTP AUTH authentication, not delayed by milter-greylist-3.0 (minas.ics.muni.cz [147.251.4.35]); Fri, 09 May 2008 11:49:22 +0200 (CEST) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello, I noticed that doing backup with rsync on my laptop from a local disk to a usb disk swaps out many processes. To advice of Jiri Slaby (cc:), I did some vmstat dumps. More precisely, I run: i=0; while true; do cat /proc/vmstat > vmstat.$i; sleep 3; i=$[$i+1]; done and in parallel, I run the rsync to make the backup. The vmstats can be found here: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xhejtman/vmstat/ (tar ball included at the end). Jiri stated that the kernel begins to swap (somewhere around vmstat.50) even if there are 70000 free pages. Any ideas? It more likely starts to swap the applications if I do not touch the laptop (actively using Firefox or something like). Also, the memory is occupied by disk caches not by the applications, so I think it should not be swapped. Moreover: $ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 0 $ cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs 499 -- Lukáš Hejtmánek