I need some help tuning my tiny 8MB mipsel system. On the production
system I expect to have (only) the following tasks running:
1 ? S 0:01 init
2 ? SW 0:00 (kflushd)
3 ? SW 0:00 (kpiod)
4 ? SW 0:02 (kswapd)
287 ? S 0:07 syslogd
298 ? SW 0:08 (klogd)
431 ? SW 0:00 crond
456 ? S 0:00 update (bdflush)
501 ? R X:XX application
502 ? S X:XX application
503 ? S X:XX application
504 ? S X:XX application
Tasks 502-504 are clones of 501 started via __clone() by 501, sharing all of
their memory, signals, file descriptors, etc. 502-504 run at realtime
process priority but very infrequently and do very little work when they
do run.
The application virtual memory size likes to hover around 9.5MB occasionally
creeping to 10.5. I'd like to devote as much of the measly 8MB of real memory
to the application to reduce the frequency of kswapd activity as much as possible.
If I am to believe what vmstat says, there is generally ~3.5MB of 'buffer' (cache?)
always allocated for something.
There seems little point in reserving much memory for disk/file data cache since
when the app reads files, it will generally read 10's of megabytes (most
of which gets copied into, in effect, off-board memory), although keeping
the ext2 fs directories in cache would be a win during file reads.
Once a day cron will wakeup and do what will probably end up being some heavy
work but only for a few minutes. I don't mind some paging or swapping at that
point (I may in fact, shutdown the application to let the jobs scheduled by
cron complete unencumbered). Very rarely will the application write anything
to disk so update shouldn't have much to do other than flush timestamps and
other stuff to /var/log/messages.
Anybody have any suggestions or good guesses as to what I should put in
/proc/sys/vm/* or anywhere else for that matter to squeeze all the performance
I can get out of this system? It is not out of the question to have the
application change values on the fly either.
Thanks in advance.
--
Dave Shepperd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Atari Games Corp. 675 Sycamore Drive, Milpitas CA 95035.
--
Standard disclaimers.
