On 21 Jan 2002, Andrew Ebling wrote: > And that is why you would want to try and do as much of the expensive > stuff in advance if at all possible. It is a bit late to go looking for > some more good candidates (pages) to swap out when the trashing has > already started. The "thrashing"/heavy VM load are the situations you're interested in, its those scenarios you want to be able to get out of or handle gracefully. > Isnt a box that is thrashing in an I/O bound state anyway? Surely the > CPU is sleeping, waiting for disk operations most of the time? No not all the time, usually the CPU is working over time traversing tables and doing VM work. If your thrashing was entirely disk I/O you're better of getting better disks... Heavy thrashing is when you keep taking pages in and out continuously without making much forward progress, its not the disks which are holding you down in this case. Regards, Zwane Mwaikambo -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
