how to recycle Inact memory more aggressively?

[Adrian Chadd]

Yeah, but his comment is that "i'm doing a large file copy operation;
why is the system paging out binaries versus recycling other file
cache memory?"

I have a feeling this is more due to the last few years of VM work to
improve file serving performance and it hasn't really been
tested/evaluated in desktop style environments where binary execution
latency matters (ie, paging out binaries is a no-no.) Bugs have crept
in and been fixed when people notice. :)

I've noticed the same on my 8 and 16G desktop laptops but I haven't
started digging into it. I was hoping it was going to be a VM bug
versus something more structural in the VM changes.


-a


On 13 March 2016 at 07:55, RW <rwmaillists at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Mar 2016 09:38:35 +0100
> Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>
>> In the course of the last year or so the behavior of the vm system
>> has changed in regard to how aggressively Inact memory is recycled.
>>
>> My box has 8GB of memory.  At the moment I'm copying 100s of gigabytes
>> from one file system to another one.
>>
>> Looking at top I observe that there are about 6GB of Inact memory.
>> This value hardly changes.  Instead of aggressively recycling the
>> Inact memory the vm now seems to prefer to swap.
>
> Paging-out is a side-effect of processing inactive memory. As the
> inactive queue is recycled a small number of pages can get copied
> out to swap with the contents remaining in memory. If you turn this
> off, the writes to can end up being done while something is waiting,
> rather than in the background.
>
> A small amount of swap in use is normal. If you see a large amount
> then check for memory leaks and unwanted files on tmpfs.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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