[WBEL-users] Kernel Upgrade to 2.6 series

[Charles Stevenson]

Dear James,

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 08:33:17AM -0600, James Knowles wrote:
> Thanks for providing all the detail. There's a lot of sysadmin stuff I 
> don't know. I looked at the source file and have an idea what I'm 
> looking at. That's very interesting.

It was my pleasure.

> I'm playing with this right now via systcl. The machine is under heavy 
> disk load. It certainly has changed the machine's behaviour!

Yep, it certainly was not the most well thoughtout hack I've ever seen.
I heard some rumors that the tuning was done to make Oracle jobs return
faster but it definitely will cause the Out of Memory (OOM) killer to go
ballistic and make the system unusable under heavy I/O. In order to get
roughly the same behavior as upstream kernel source set it to 100%. I
doubt if you'll notice performance decrease. It's not worth any
performance gain to me to have the possibility of the kernel starving
itself. Just my two cents (many sleepless nights fighting this issue ;).

Regards,
Charlie

-- 
 Charles Stevenson <cstevenson@atipa.com>
 HPC Linux Engineer/Atipa Technologies
 Tel: (785)841-9559 ext. 3116
 Fax: (785)841-1809