On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 09:10:54PM -0400, César Catrián C. wrote:
> 
> Hi. I would like to ask about this situation:
> 
> While I was unpacking the distribution sets, I opened another session on 
> screen(1) for mounting a cdrom. Disk activity was raised very much and I had to 
> wait about 30 seconds. At the same time, on top(1) I saw a [ioflush] kernel 
> process on a biowait state. Then, using xuvmstat, I saw a fast growing file 
> memory.
> 
> My memory usage, 256MB and usually:
> 50MB by executables, 100MB by anonymous, 45MB by kernel and the rest 60MB, 
> usually), by file memory.
> 
> With the NEW_BUFQ_STRATEGY kernel option set.
> 
> My UVM configuration:
> vm.anonmin = 48
> vm.execmin = 25
> vm.filemin = 0
> vm.anonmax = 65
> vm.execmax = 35
> vm.filemax = 0
> vm.bufcache = 5
> 
> These were my big processes at the time of the situation:
> ˇ X session with openbox, firefox, amule, httpd, mysqld.
> 
> I believe it is ok that free memory be used by file memory, but I need some way
> to adjust the priority or some hard limit (can freemin be raised?). And I don't 
> know if the file memory can be freed in a faster way than some files being 
> unpacked.
> 
> Please point me at the correct mail thread if this topic has been discussed.

I don't think it is an issue with freeing memory in this specific case.
The mount system call may have triggered a flush of active buffers or
vnodes, and this is what caused the delay.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--