On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 08:23:01PM +0200, Lars Heidieker wrote:
> For me it would look right to make vnode pages that are not mapped by any
> process inactive.
> This would allow the fs cache to grow to approx 1/3 of main mem and it
> would be able to use even more memory if it is free.

this is basically what eduardo proposed, and the problem with that is that
the other 2/3 of memory will more-or-less always contain anon data for
user processes (such as our favorite application, netscape).  so we
wouldn't be able to use any of that memory for caching file data
*no matter how long the process is idle*.  the process could sleep
for *years* and we would never page it out.

perhaps what we need is some more gradual shifting of pages from one
use to the other.  the current scheme will convert pages from one use
to another (up to the limits) as fast as it can, maybe slowing that
down would be better.


> Merging the two inactive queues improves the paging behaviour, I have
> treied that anon and vnode pages get paged much more smoothly....

hmm, I can see how the dual-inactive queue scheme might have some
odd behaviour, yea.  do you have any numbers on how the current scheme
behaves in a real system?  maybe you could post a diff that implements
the merged inactive queue so that people could try it out?

-Chuck