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Note that there are very few people who are testing interactive feel. I'd
be happier with more people giving more subjective comments on how the
system feels under heavy memory load.
The only feedback I have so far says that pre-7 is much better than any of
the pre-6 versions, but I'd be happier with more coverage depth and more
comments from people in different circumstances. For example, what does it
feel like when you're paging heavily and doing a "find" at the same time
on a 16M machine?
I know this is harder than just trying to determine the throughput of
something, but the pre-6 thing certainly showed how dangerous it was to
just look at numbers.
Linus
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On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Note that there are very few people who are testing interactive feel. I'd
> be happier with more people giving more subjective comments on how the
> system feels under heavy memory load.
With my latest free_user_and_cache() (arca-vm >= 16) you can't get bad
iteractive performances. Usually bad iteractive performances are due
unbalaced algorithms in the big try_to_free_pages() path.
Andrea Arcangeli
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On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 21:33:08 -0800 (PST)
> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
> To: Steve Bergman <steve@netplus.net>
> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@e-mind.com>,
brent verner <damonbrent@earthlink.net>,
Garst R. Reese <reese@isn.net>,
Kalle Andersson <kalle.andersson@mbox303.swipnet.se>,
Zlatko Calusic <Zlatko.Calusic@CARNet.hr>,
Ben McCann <bmccann@indusriver.com>,
bredelin@ucsd.edu,
linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu,
linux-mm@kvack.org,
Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
Stephen C. Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Hi!
I am not a hacker but I read linux-kernel with great interest.
(maybe when I grow up I become a kernel-hacker ;-) )
> Note that there are very few people who are testing interactive feel. I'd
> be happier with more people giving more subjective comments on how the
> system feels under heavy memory load.
Yes! Interactive feel is more important for me than any benchmark result.
As I always let play x11amp my favorite music in the background, it's also
important that there are no breaks in the playback. So I booted my P166MMX
with 128MB of RAM (SCSI-only) with mem=16M (your pre7-patch applied).
Here my subjective comment:
I am running X (fvwm2), netscape, 'find /' in an xterm, x11amp,
kicq and writing this email with Pine.
There are no problems except the cursor jumps around when I am moving my
mouse (I run X with a priority of -18, a good idea?).
X11amp (suid root, the readme says that it'll run in 'realtime-mode'
then) randomly stops playing for a few milliseconds (while swapping).
Starting another xterm takes about 6 seconds. Console-switching is fast.
No need to say that netscape reacts really slowly.
Network throughput is normal I think (~620 K/sec on a 10Mbit LAN, NE2000
compatible PCI-network card).
Attached is a ps snapshot of running processes.
Btw with 128MB RAM it's hardly possible to make x11amp pausing playback.
'free' says:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 14576 14192 384 6628 348 6724
-/+ buffers/cache: 7120 7456
Swap: 66460 23572 42888
I am very happy with current linux-kernels. No hang, no oops, no reboot,
no problems (and never had). Really good work!
Greetings,
Stefan
--
Stefan Becker (stefan@die-macht.oph.rwth-aachen.de)
Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany
http://www.rwth-aachen.de
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Well, sometimes the system writes to swap before I have used half my
memory ( in X ) I view this with wmmon in windowmaker.. also on shutting
down the system, it fails to unmount partitions saying they are busy and
forcing checks next boot saying they were not cleanly unmounted.
2.2.0-pre4 - pre6 ( I do not have pre7 to test )
On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> Note that there are very few people who are testing interactive feel. I'd
> be happier with more people giving more subjective comments on how the
> system feels under heavy memory load.
>
> The only feedback I have so far says that pre-7 is much better than any of
> the pre-6 versions, but I'd be happier with more coverage depth and more
> comments from people in different circumstances. For example, what does it
> feel like when you're paging heavily and doing a "find" at the same time
> on a 16M machine?
>
> I know this is harder than just trying to determine the throughput of
> something, but the pre-6 thing certainly showed how dangerous it was to
> just look at numbers.
>
> Linus
>
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>
---
*************************************
* Joseph Anthony *
* jga@cowboy.net *
* http://wasteland.cowboy.net *
* ------------------------------- *
* System Administrator Cowboy.net *
* http://www.cowboy.net *
*************************************
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Hi,
On Tue, 12 Jan 1999 10:58:06 -0600 (CST), Joseph Anthony
<jga@alien.cowboy.net> said:
> Well, sometimes the system writes to swap before I have used half my
> memory ( in X ) I view this with wmmon in windowmaker..
Suspect wmmon in that case. If you can show this happening in a trace
output from "vmstat 1", then I'll start to worry.
--Stephen
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Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Note that there are very few people who are testing interactive feel. I'd
> be happier with more people giving more subjective comments on how the
> system feels under heavy memory load.
I left my machine today (64mb/80mb swap, running pre6 on an MMX/233) running
netscape, xemacs, a few rxvt's, and xscreensaver. Many times when I get home
after classes, xscreensaver's GL apps will have swapped large portions of
netscape and xemacs out. Today when I came home, I tried to check my mail, and
write a bit of code, but everything was swapping left and right. It wasn't
just that netscape and xemacs got swapped back in, and then that was
that--instead it just continually ground my hard drive as it downloaded email
and I switched around to apps, etc, for a good few minutes. Very unpleasant.
FYI,
m.
--
"We watched her fall over and lay down,
shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers."
-- Lee Rinaldo, Sonic Youth
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"Stephen C. Tweedie" wrote:
> > Well, sometimes the system writes to swap before I have used half my
> > memory ( in X ) I view this with wmmon in windowmaker..
>
> Suspect wmmon in that case. If you can show this happening in a trace
> output from "vmstat 1", then I'll start to worry.
wmmon stuffs both swap and physical mem in its "MEM" area, and also has a
listing for "SWP", ie swap. I assume top is still reliable?
m.
--
"We watched her fall over and lay down,
shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers."
-- Lee Rinaldo, Sonic Youth
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Hi,
On Tue, 12 Jan 1999 15:15:22 -0500, Michael K Vance <mkv102@psu.edu>
said:
> wmmon stuffs both swap and physical mem in its "MEM" area, and also has a
> listing for "SWP", ie swap. I assume top is still reliable?
It should be, yes.
--Stephen
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