On 12/9/05, James Melin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> My VM guy here is saying that he read some place that having mini-disk
> cache turned on for mini-disk volumes used by linux for system disk is a
> good thing.

With current z/VM releases there are certainly cases where you have
benefit of MDC for Linux minidisks. One would need to have a closer
look at the configuration to see whether in your case it would be a
good idea.

> From what I can see I'm caching 550 megs in Central stor on average and 163
> or so megs to expanded. The only disks I could get him to turn off caching
> for was my linux swap volumes.

That's fair, because it is very rare for a swap page to be read a
second time, so you would not often have an MDC hit. Have you
considered swapping to VDISK rather than real disk and avoid the
entire thing?

> So who is right? Isn't it correct that turning off mini-disk caching for
> the linux volumes is the recommended method? Wouldn't that free up memory

It's recommended from what I recall, but not by me :-)

> othwise used by VM for the caching? We're getting very close to making VM
> page on a consistent basis. We're running 6 websphere servers in 6 gigs
> real 1 gig expanded (I know it should be more. We just don't have it).

You'd have to look whether you're paging because of contention under
the 2G bar. For starters I would disabled MDC in expanded storage and
use that purely for paging. And I suggest to see in your performance
monitor whether you are doing a lot of page moves around the 2G bar.

Rob
--
Rob van der Heij                  rvdheij @ gmail.com

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