On Apr 27 2007 08:18, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio > >and say if it seems to improve things. I think those are much saner >defaults especially for a desktop system (and probably for most servers >too, for that matter).
Interesting. For my laptop, I have configured like 90 for dirty_background_ratio and 95 for dirty_ratio. Makes for a nice delayed write, but I do not do workloads bigger than extracing kernel tarballs (~250 MB) and coding away on that machine (488 MB RAM) anyway. Setting it to something like 95, I could probably rm -Rf the kernel tree again and the disk never gets active because it is all cached. But if dirty_ratio is lowered, the disk will get active soon. >Historical note: allowing about half of memory to contain dirty pages made >more sense back in the days when people had 16-64MB of memory, and a >single untar of even fairly small projects would otherwise hit the disk. >But memory sizes have grown *much* more quickly than disk speeds (and >latency requirements have gone down, not up), so a default that may >actually have been perfectly fine at some point seems crazy these days.. Jan -- - 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/
