Re: Using swap though there's plenty of mem free

[Simon Burge <simonb%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Jonathan Schleifer wrote:

> I realized that NetBSD nearly always uses swap on my machine though
> there's plenty of free memory. It often uses 200 MB file cache, but
> swapps. I don't see any sense in that.
> As this is a server, that leads to VERY undesired behaviour, for
> example, lighttpd is moved to swap and takes a FEW SECONDS to answer
> the next request.
> Isn't there an option to tell NetBSD to stop that stupidity and free
> the file cache when applications need it far more badly? I don't want
> files cached that aren't used so often anyway. In this case, a 200 MB
> file was cached that was only used once. That doesn't make any sense.
> If there's no such option to change that, could that PLEASE be changed
> in NetBSD 5? I'm already thinking about disabling swap at all since the
> machine runs WAY faster then.

Just on a hunch, does playing with the vm.{anon,exec,file}{min,max}
sysctls help?  I thought we had something about tuning with them in the
guide, but there's a (really) brief mention of them in sysctl(3).

The google folks point out http://www.selonen.org/arto/netbsd/ as well.
I didn't actually read any of this, but it mentions the right words when
I skimmed it.  :)

Cheers,
Simon.