Re: [PATCH] fix for VM test9-pre,

Ying Chen/Almaden/IBM
2000-10-02T16:40:30Z

Hi,

There are a couple strange behavior I saw with this vm patch on my box.
I ran Linux test9-pre7 with the newest vmpatch in on a Dell PowerEdge with
2 GB memory.

This patch seems to make interactive applications run with very very long
response times when memory is short space.
Example 1: If I do mke2fs on a 90GB file system, after halfway through
making the file system, the lower 1GB is filled up.
mkfs takes practically for ever to finish. I checked the sysrq-m output,
DMA has only 512K buffer, NORMAL has 1020K, HIGHMEM has 1 GB.
When this happens, I basically cannot do anything, not even ls, df, top,
etc. They all take for ever to run. If I kill mkfs, (closing the telnet
sessions
that mkfs was in) things starts to come back alive. It almost feels like
something got stuck somewhere.
Eample 2: I ran SPEC SFS tests to stress the Linux box. During the tests,
the lower memory will be filled up with inode cache and dcache entries,
while HIGHMEM is not quite used at all. Once this happens, again, any
interactive commands would take forever to finish... Eventually, SPEC SFS
would timeout and fail. Sometimes, if I managed to kill some processes, I
can temporarilly get some other applications run. But most of the
applications would get stuch somewhere very quickly later on.

I don't see such behavior in test6 though.
Any ideas?

Ying