swapper: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20

Joonas Kortesalmi
2004-01-01T09:35:56Z

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After running 2.6.0 on a server for a few days, I met an interesting and
annoying problem. I was playing with NFS over gigabit ethernet (e1000) and
it was a bit slow. I tried to find out why by running top and I saw syslog-ng
eating almost 10% of the 1,3GHz Duron. Looked at the log and there was a huge
flood of these messages:

swapper: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20
irssi: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20
swapper: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20
vim: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20
swapper: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20

most of the messages starting with swapper.

After a quick google search it looks like this kind of a problem existed in
a bit older 2.5/2.6 serie kernels. It looks like it's still with us.

Linux hamsu.org 2.6.0 #1 Mon Dec 29 21:07:28 EET 2003 i686 AMD Duron(tm) processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Shortly about the hardware of the machine in case it would matter:
AMD Duron 1,3GHz CPU, 768MB of RAM, Intel PRO/1000MT Desktop and Realtek 8139C
NICs.

Pre-empt was disabled in the kernel config and the kernel didn't have any
extra patches. A pure vanilla kernel.

I'm not a subscriber so please CC me a copy of messages related to the subject.
I'm not sure if I can help much looking at the insides of the kernel, but I will
try my best answering any questions about this.
- --
Joonas OH8GDV (ham call sign) OpenPGP: 0x5F72BE43
( 0B37 05E0 0FB4 EB2E 161C DCE6 7F7B C645 5F72 BE43 )
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