Tuning memory usage

[John-Mark Gurney]

Bruce O'Neel wrote this message on Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 06:42 +0000:
> I have a normally unloaded 5.4-release systems with 256 meg of memory
> and 2 CPUs.  Every 20 mins a job starts that runs 1 process per CPU,
> so 2 in this case. Each process gets SIZE to 130 meg or so, but, RES
> never climbs above 32meg or so.
> 
> While running, top shows 34 meg buffer and 12 meg cache.
> 
> Oddly enough when I only run one of the two processes the RES size
> still doesn't climb above 32meg or so.
> 
> Is there some setting to let RES get bigger?  I would help with these
> jobs.

Are you experiencing swapping that is causing these processes to slow
down?  make sure you are not running ANYTHING else on the system that
will consume memory..  you shouldn't have any trouble getting total
res up to 200megs...

if you are using mmap as part of it, pages could possibly be quickly
recycled to the inactive queue though they are still resident which
would keep your resident size down even though they could get readded
quickly...

if your machine isn't swapping, and is consuming 100% cpu usage, then
I wouldn't worry about the small resident size...

> I realize, of course, the more memory would help the problem.  I'm just
> waiting for ebay.ch to have something sensible.

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."