Dear all! I've a question regarding the work of the Virtual Memory Manager. Unfortunately reading the "Understanding The Linux Virtual Memory Manager" (Mel Gorman) didn't help much.
In general the question is how to determine on the working machine what the number of the pages_min is? I have a SunFire v20z running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 7) 2.4.21-40.ELsmp. To be honest this question is not of very high urgency and it does not imply high practical importance. The interest was stimulated by the observing the VM activities on the machine. The server has 4G of physical RAM and 4G of swap. A Java App is running on this host. It works quite stable, but any time I check the memory state I see that the free memory is quite low, and the swap is not used at all. It does not worry me as far as I don't see any lack of memory messages, but I wonder how the zone balancing occurs, how does it determine the way of freeing pages and how can make the system to start swaping (just for testing of cause). I tried to load my system a bit more (started different applications to consume the memory), but as you all guessed, all I've got is slightly lessened free mem and some reclamation between cached/used/free. I thought the value of min_free_kbytes would help me, but I didn't find it on my system: ls /proc/sys/vm/ bdflush dcache_priority hugetlb_pool inactive_clean_percent kscand_work_percent kswapd max_map_count max-readahead min-readahead oom-kill overcommit_memory overcommit_ratio pagecache page-cluster pagetable_cache skip_mapped_pages stack_defer_threshold The sample output of free –m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3955 3927 28 0 65 3611 -/+ buffers/cache: 250 3705 Swap: 4094 0 4094 I will greatly appreciate any assistance although I understand that my question does not suite this mailing-list entirely. Thanks a lot! - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/