Re: How to tune vm to be less swap happy?

[Sean Neakums <sneakums@zork.net>]

commence  Andrea Aime quotation:

> sorry to bother you with this question, but I feel that current vm
> defaults are not tuned for a workstation use, but for a file
> server/db server use.
> [...] is there anything I can do to shrink the cache and to allow a
> bigger part of my working set to fit into memory? Moreover, what vm
> tuning do you advice for a typical workstation use with memory
> hungry applications?

I've found the rmap VM[0] to be a lot less swap-happy than the stock
VM.  For example, I don't come in in the morning to find that the
updatedb run has pushed everything into swap and bloated the inode and
dentry caches to ridiculous sizes.  There is also a patch around for
the stock VM, but I haven't tried it and I don't know what it does.

[0] http://www.surriel.com/patches/  -- I used the March 1 patch on
    2.4.18 and am now running with the April 9 patch.

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