I'm posting this back to the list for the sake of publicly documenting some of the stuff I've done.
At 2003-08-20T08:27:36Z, criggie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> What was this step for?
I wanted to tell the kernel to cache as little as possible. Note that I
haven't spent a whole lot of time tuning these values, and they be not be
anywhere near optimal.
From /usr/src/kernel-source-2.2.25/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt:
>> vm/buffermem = 0 0 5
buffermem:
The three values in this file correspond to the values in the struct
buffer_mem. It controls how much memory should be used for buffer
memory. The percentage is calculated as a percentage of total system
memory.
The values are:
min_percent -- this is the minimum percentage of memory
that should be spent on buffer memory
borrow_percent -- UNUSED
max_percent -- UNUSED
>> vm/page-cluster = 1
page-cluster:
The Linux VM subsystem avoids excessive disk seeks by reading multiple
pages on a page fault. The number of pages it reads is dependent on the
amount of memory in your machine.
The number of pages the kernel reads in at once is equal to 2 ^
page-cluster. Values above 2 ^ 5 don't make much sense for swap because
we only cluster swap data in 32-page groups.
>> vm/pagecache = 0 0 5
pagecache:
This file does exactly the same as buffermem, only this file controls
the struct page_cache, and thus controls the amount of memory used for
the page cache.
In 2.2, the page cache is used for 3 main purposes:
- caching read() data from files
- caching mmap()ed data and executable files
- swap cache
When your system is both deep in swap and high on cache, it probably
means that a lot of the swapped data is being cached, making for more
efficient swapping than possible with the 2.0 kernel.
>> vm/pagetable_cache = 0 0
pagetable_cache:
The kernel keeps a number of page tables in a per-processor cache (this
helps a lot on SMP systems). The cache size for each processor will be
between the low and the high value.
On a low-memory, single CPU system you can safely set these values to 0
so you don't waste the memory. On SMP systems it is used so that the
system can do fast pagetable allocations without having to acquire the
kernel memory lock.
For large systems, the settings are probably OK. For normal systems they
won't hurt a bit. For small systems (<16MB ram) it might be advantageous
to set both values to 0.
>> 5) Installed svncviewer.
> I didn't even know this app existed! Its very cool :)
Definitely. I'd had X up and running, but performance was abyssmal.
> Mine's running at 1024x768 (the native resolution of the laptop screen)
> fine, in 16 bit mode.
I envy you. :)
> Kirk - Have you got any way to boot the laptop off either floppy, or a
> PCMCIA card? My hard drive is bloody noisy, thats the only problem at the
> moment.
I don't think either of those would be very reasonable on my setup. All of
the PCMCIA and linux-wlan-ng stuff would make for more boot floppies than
I'd care to mess with.
I replaced the old, dead drive with a new, silent Samsung 10GB model. Is
that an option for you?
> Very cool - thank you for posting :)
You bet! It was such an ordeal that I wanted to give other users a kick in
the right direction, and hope that such a thing was possible at all.
--
Kirk Strauser
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