VSwap
New RHEL6-based OpenVZ kernel has a new memory management model, which supersedes User beancounters. It is called VSwap.
Now you can set two primary parameters: physpages
and swappages
, while all the other beancounters become secondary and optional.
- physpages
- This parameter limits the physical memory (RAM) available to processes inside a container.
- The
barrier
is ignored and should be set to 0, and thelimit
sets the limit. - Currently (as of >= 042stab042) the user memory, the kernel memory and the page cache are accounted into
physpages
.
- swappages
- This parameter limits the amount of swap space which can be used for processes inside a container.
- The
barrier
is ignored and should be set to 0, and thelimit
sets the limit.
The sum of physpages.limit
and swappages.limit
limits the maximum amount
of allocated memory which can be used by a container. When physpages limit
is reached, memory pages belonging to the container are pushed out to
so called virtual swap (vswap). The difference between normal swap
and vswap is that with vswap no actual disk I/O usually occurs. Instead,
a container is artificially slowed down, to emulate the effect of the real
swapping. Actual swap out occurs only if there is a global memory shortage
on the system.
Setting
Since vzctl 3.0.30, you can use --ram
and --swap
parameters, like this:
vzctl set 777 --ram 512M --swap 1G --save
If you are converting an existing CT from old (non-vswap) configuration, you can either
- leave all the other UBC parameters as-is,
- or set those to 'unlimited',
- or remove those from configuration file.