Re: Heavy load of graphics

Owen Ford
2004-10-07T06:25:42Z

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2825 bytes --]

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 00:48, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> At 10:07 AM 10/7/2004 +0800, Peter wrote:
> >Want to free memory?
> >
> >$ free
> > total used free shared buffers cached
> >Mem: 223708 220120 3588 0 28356 107936
> >-/+ buffers/cache: 83828 139880
> >Swap: 128480 3996 124484
> >
> >$ locate /usr/bin/f* or x* or g* ...
> >
> >
> >$ free
> > total used free shared buffers cached
> >Mem: 223708 41364 182344 0 1520 28592
> >-/+ buffers/cache: 11252 212456
> >Swap: 128480 5056 123424
>
> Peter -- This is a pretty strange consequence of running the "locate"
> command. And I cannot replicate it here. For example:
>
> ray@waverly:~$ free
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 773892 742056 31836 0 87600 441912
> -/+ buffers/cache: 212544 561348
> Swap: 0 0 0
> ray@waverly:~$ locate /usr/bin/f*
> /usr/bin/factor
> [about 40 more lines, deleted here]
> ray@waverly:~$ free
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 773892 742076 31816 0 87608 441924
> -/+ buffers/cache: 212544 561348
> Swap: 0 0 0
>
> Any idea what's causing the change on your system? My understanding of
> Linux says it shouldn't work the way you report seeing it, so I'm wondering
> what I am missing.

It's not really anything to do with locate. You create an enormous
amount of memory pressure that won't be needed but the once. This
causes tho VM to dump most of what is in RAM to swap or just free the
pages.

I believe that is the LRU algorithm doing its job :)

In my case most of my applications were dumped to swap. X was still
snappy but almost everything else was massively sluggish and locate ate
all available memory plus a big chunk of swap.

spider ~ # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1034704 1023732 10972 0 53008 334368
-/+ buffers/cache: 636356 398348
Swap: 2048248 25464 2022784
spider ~ # locate /usr/bin/g*
<snip>
spider ~ # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1034704 132848 901856 0 652 36024
-/+ buffers/cache: 96172 938532
Swap: 2048248 252972 1795276
spider ~ #

--
Owen Ford <oford@arghblech.com>

() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\ - against proprietary attachments

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]