Marcelo Tosatti wrote:

Hi,

As well known, the VM does not make a distiction between global and
per-zone shortages when trying to free memory. That means if only a given
memory zone is under shortage, the kernel will scan pages from all zones.

The following patch (against 2.4.6-ac2), changes the kernel behaviour to
avoid freeing pages from zones which do not have an inactive and/or
free shortage.

Now I'm able to run memory hogs allocating 4GB of memory (on 4GB machine)
without getting real long hangs on my ssh session. (which used to happen
on stock -ac2 due to exhaustion of DMA pages for networking).

Comments ?

Dirk, Can you please try the patch and tell us if it fixes your problem ?

great!! that is definitely better, the machine talks to me again. there are some
small "but"s. however. i write them up and let you know.

    ~dirkw


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