On 7/25/05, Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 09:09:01PM +0200, Zeljko Vrba wrote:
> > I have also noticed the following unfair bufcache assignment to filesys=
tems:
>=20
> How is this unfair? If the file system is the component in the system tha=
t
> is generating the most dirty pages, why not let it?

It just needs to give those pages up sooner. I ran a test a few
minutes ago. My system (v2.0) has been up for 75 days. It has 768M of
RAM and right now 418M is allocated to "File". I open a bash shell and
type the following:

    $ JUNK=3Daaaaaaa
    $ JUNK=3D${JUNK}${JUNK}${JUNK}

I repeat the last line over and over. In another shell, I have 'top'
running to watch the memory used by the shell grow. Once the "Free"
memory is exhausted, I start to see processes get swapped out. The
"File" memory is still at 418M! (my BSD box is primarily a DSL
router/firewall, so I *know* most of that 418M can be tossed.)

After the test, the processes get swapped back in.

I've set vm.filemin to 0 and vm.filemax to 2. 418M is quite a bit
above 2% of system memory. In my opinion, NetBSD is way too aggressive
in holding file contents.

--=20
Rich

AIM : rnezzy
ICQ : 174908475