Many machines now have exactly 1Gb ram and the standard memory split on i386 does not allow you to use more than 896Mb ram without enabling high memory for at least 4Gb. The problem is that this incurs an overhead whereas we can simply change this split with this patch to allow i386 architectures to use up to 1Gb ram without enabling highmem. This is configurable if HIGHMEM is disabled.
Now.. I fit this category, having 1 gig ram and having to set "CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y" to compile 2.6.7.1 to allow usage of the full 1 gig. Anyone know what sort of "overhead" is involved here ? If it's significant I'll look at implementing the patch.. but it seems to me that if its such a problem-solver why isn'ty it in the stock kernel ?
cheers
Rod
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Michael Chesterton wrote:
Rod Butcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Sluggers, I have 1 gig ram and 4 gig Swap on a Sata drive... performance when using memory-hogs like Sweep audio editor is great while it's using ram, but slows to a crawl once it starts using swap... not just Sweep but any app. Is this normal, or can I tune this in some way ? (I've spent my hardware budget for the next 3 years so no more ram).
thanks
My laptop needs to use swap, and there is a noticeable difference in
performance between different kernel versions as developers have
directly or indirectly changed the behaviour of swap.
There's a knob which you can play with in /proc/sys/vm/swappiness,
there's probably other things you can tweak, too.
If you like patching and compiling your own kernels, try the con kolivas tree, http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/. It's designed to improve responsiveness on desktops. I have no idea how it will go with your work load, though, it sounds like you need to swap, and no tuning or mucking around is going to have much effect. In my case, there isn't one application that needs loads of memory, just lots of applications that need a little, so the balance of the size of filesystem cache/buffers, and what, when and how much to swap something out has an effect.
.
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