On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 09:46:34 +0100 Thomas Klausner <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 12:18:01PM -0400, Michael wrote: > > I've had firefox starting to get swapped out ( and everything > > slowing to a crawl because of it ) while in active use, with more > > than half of RAM being used as file cache, and nothing hammering > > the filesystem either. > > One would think the OS would shrink the cache first, especially if > > it's several gigabytes. > > > > It helped somewhat to add this to sysctl.conf: > > vm.filemin=2 > > vm.filemax=10 > > now it still uses well over 10% or memory as file cache but seems > > more willing to shrink it. > > I just gave that a try after X was killed again, setting the values > with sysctl -w. > > Then I restarted X, gnucash and firefox and X got killed again before > all of them had finished starting up. > > Is there some delay until these values are really used? Or are they > only relevant if we're below the magic boundary and afterwards they > are not enforced so much because the limit has already been broken? > How do those limits work? > Thomas Those values are used under memory pressure when the pagedaemon scans for pages to be replaced. They change the behavior which pages are taken as candidates for replacement. Lars ----- Mystische Erklärungen: Die mystischen Erklärungen gelten für tief; die Wahrheit ist, dass sie noch nicht einmal oberflächlich sind. -- Friedrich Nietzsche [ Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft Buch 3, 126 ]
