Re: [PATCH] cvsimport: introduce -L<imit> option to workaround memory leaks

On Tue, 23 May 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

So an unpacked git archive on ext3 (but not ext2, I believe: ext2 should 
use the page cache for directories) ends up being very buffer-cache 
intensive. And the buffer cache is basically deprecated..

A few notes: I'm not 100% sure things really fit in the 2GB (*), so it 
really may be IO limited, and the low CPU use is just because that machine 
also happens to have a dang fast next-gen Intel CPU that hasn't even been 
released yet.

Also, I do realize that hashed directories should actually decrease the 
buffer cache pressure too, just because we wouldn't need to read all of 
the directory for a lookup. 

		Linus

(*) cvsps itself grows to 1.6GB of the 2GB and while that memory should be 
largely idle, the problem may simply be that we don't swap it out eagerly 
enough. Allowing filesystem metadata to swap out processes is something 
we've tuned against, because it tends to result in horrible interactive 
behaviour after a nightly "updatedb" run. So it's entirely possible that 
this is all normal..