On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 12:56:07AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > When has free ever given any usefull "free" number? I can perfectly > fine allocate another gigabyte of memory despide free saing 25MB. But > that is because I know that the buffer/cached are not locked in. Well, as you said you know that buffer/cached are not locked in. If /proc/meminfo would be rubbish like you seem to imply in the first line, why would we ever bother to export that information and even waste time writing a binary that parse it for admins? > On the other hand 1GB can instantly vanish when I start a xen domain > and anything relying on the free value would loose. Actually you better check meminfo or free before starting a 1G of Xen!! > The only sensible thing for an application concerned with swapping is > to whatch the swapping and then reduce itself. Not the amount > free. Although I wish there were some kernel interface to get a > preasure value of how valuable free pages would be right now. I would > like that for fuse so a userspace filesystem can do caching without > cripling the kernel. Repeated drop caches + free can help. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
