On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Artem S. Tashkinov <t.ar...@lycos.com> wrote: > > My feeling is that vm.dirty_ratio/vm.dirty_background_ratio should _not_ be > percentage based, 'cause for PCs/servers with a lot of memory (say 64GB or > more) this value becomes unrealistic (13GB) and I've already had some > unpleasant effects due to it.
Right. The percentage notion really goes back to the days when we typically had 8-64 *megabytes* of memory So if you had a 8MB machine you wouldn't want to have more than one megabyte of dirty data, but if you were "Mr Moneybags" and could afford 64MB, you might want to have up to 8MB dirty!! Things have changed. So I would suggest we change the defaults. Or pwehaps make the rule be that "the ratio numbers are 'ratio of memory up to 1GB'", to make the semantics similar across 32-bit HIGHMEM machines and 64-bit machines. The modern way of expressing the dirty limits are to give the actual absolute byte amounts, but we default to the legacy ratio mode.. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/