Re: filesystem access slowing system to a crawl

Andrea Arcangeli
2003-02-19T17:40:26Z

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 05:42:34PM +0100, Marc-Christian Petersen wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 February 2003 10:39, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> > > Running just "find /" (or ls -R or tar on a large directory) locally
> > > slows the box down to absolute unresponsiveness - it takes minutes
> > > to just run ps and kill the find process. During that time, kupdated
> > > and kswapd gobble up all available CPU time.
> > Could be that your "low memory" is filled up with inodes. This would
> > only happen in these tests if you're using ext2, and there are a *lot*
> > of directories.
> > I've prepared a lineup of Andrea's VM patches at
> > It would be useful if you could apply 10_inode-highmem-2.patch and
> > report back. It applies to 2.4.19 as well, and should work OK there.
> is there any reason why this (inode-highmem-2) has never been submitted for
> inclusion into mainline yet?

Marcelo please include this:

http://www.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.4/2.4.21pre4aa3/10_inode-highmem-2

other fixes should be included too but they don't apply cleanly yet
unfortunately, I (or somebody else) should rediff them against mainline.

Andrea