hi all

i'm running into problems with an old low memory (96M) machine serving as gw/proxy/knfs-server. if the box is running some time it starts to swap out quite much. after 4 days i've 2/3 of 138M swap used. this alone doesn't bother me, but at the same time 25~30M are free (+ 5M buffers + 24M cache). i tried a lot with the tuning knobs in /proc/sys/vm but that didn't help. it looks like the 2.4.26 doesn't reuse the free mem fast enough (or frees some swaped out pages ) - so every time a process takes memory and frees it afterwards it won't get used (since the box is idle most of the time and no other process will need anything?).

anyway, the machine (luckily) stops that behavior at ~30M free - but this is way to much for a 96M machine (it should use it for cache/buffer; i would be happy with ~10M) i'd like to know if somebody has an idea about settings for vm_cache_scan_ratio, vm_lru_balance_ratio, vm_mapped_ratio, vm_passes, vm_vfs_scan_ratio in proc/sys/vm. i already searched ../mm/vmscan.c and others but i'm quiet clueless about better settings here (ex. how much to raise mapped_ratio). or is the bdflush responsible for this? also i found lot of useful sites/posts on that, but their prob's more about using bigmem machines (>2G ram) ;-)

i havn't noticed that problem back on the 2.4.24 but some things (overall load/filesystems) changed since using it. also free mem shrinks if i stream files off the ogg server or up/download files via nfs since this data will be buffered/cached, but soon after stopping, free raises again =(

does anybody have an idea how to stop that?

thx
mritch.