From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> To: Ben LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com> Subject: Re: [RFC][DATA] re "ongoing vm suckage" Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 23:37:41 -0700 (PDT) Cc: Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>, Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, <linux-mm@kvack.org> On Sat, 4 Aug 2001, Ben LaHaise wrote: > > Within reason. I'm actually heading to bed now, so it'll have to wait > until tomorrow, but it is fairly trivial to reproduce by dd'ing to an 8GB > non-sparse file. Also, duplicating a huge file will show similar > breakdown under load. Well, I've made a 2.4.8-pre4. This one has marcelo's zone fixes, and my request suggestions. I'm writing email right now with the 8GB write in the background, and unpacked and patched a kernel. It's certainly not _fast_, but it's not too painful to use either. The 8GB file took 7:25 to write (including the sync), which averages out to 18+MB/s. Which is, as far as I can tell, about the best I can get on this 5400RPM 80GB drive with the current IDE driver (the experimental IDE driver is supposed to do better, but that's not for 2.4.x) An added advantage of doing the waiting in the request handling was that this way it automatically balances reads against writes - writes cannot cause reads to fail because they have separate request queue allocations. Does it work reasonably under your loads? Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/