[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Xen-devel] Memory overcommit



Even better, if each domain is only used occasionally, then you could save them to disc and restore them on demand. Then they consume no memory when not in use. You could combine this with use of the balloon driver to implement an allocation policy for in-use domains (as Kip suggests) --- e.g., if X domains are active, each gets 1/X of available memory.

 -- Keir

On 11 Dec 2005, at 02:00, Kip Macy wrote:

The balloon driver provides a mechanism for reducing a guest's memory allocation at run-time. At least in principle, it would not be difficult to write a small app that provided policy to slim down idle domUs.

                 -Kip

On 12/9/05, Tracy R Reed <treed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > wrote:
critical) machine for a number of months now. It's looking really good.

One thing that I have not yet seen anyone mention as a feature that I
would really like to see is the ability to overcommit memory. I have 2G
of RAM in my machine. I would like to give a developer his own virtual
domain to sandbox his application development without having to dedicate a whole piece of hardware to just him. But I know he won't really log in and use it all that often. If I give him 512M of my 2G that's 25% of my
memory that will likely be unutilized most of the time. It would be
great if I could assign more memory to domains than I actually have and
just let it swap out idle pages. I bet there are a lot of boxes out
there, especially in webserver colo's, that really don't get much
traffic and really don't need as much RAM as they have in them for
normal day to day operations. Just let them swap everything back in and
use up to the maximum RAM configured for that domain if they get busy
and need it but let it swap out the rest of the time so other busier
domains can use the physical RAM.

This is feature #1 on my Xen wishlist. Is there any work going into this
area?

--
Tracy R Reed
http://copilotconsulting.com
1-877-MY-COPILOT

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
 Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel


 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.