From: <Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl>
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: a Linux swap storm
Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 21:31:37 +0200 (MEST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <200605071931.k47JVbs18224@apps.cwi.nl> (raw)
Earlier this evening I showed someone some pictures under X:
% display -size 300x300 *.jpg
(395 pictures, 315 MB). When display (from ImageMagick)
started to repeat, I exited the program.
At this moment the machine became unusable for twenty minutes
of solid disk activity.
No keystroke seen, not even the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill X,
or Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch consoles, no mouse movement seen,
vmstat did not produce any output for twenty minutes.
The vmstat 5 output was
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 3 315728 3164 4424 3356 646 382 792 382 2425 182 0 5 0 95
1 1 316356 3856 4428 3572 454 366 507 366 2242 150 0 5 0 95
0 1 317540 3784 4456 3664 530 578 590 578 2403 179 0 7 0 93
0 1 306740 4240 4524 5372 127013 49878 129427 50061 405016 32901 0 4 0 95
1 1 306712 3992 4536 5372 30 0 30 3 450 122 2 1 94 2
0 0 306692 4016 4548 5372 18 0 18 3 402 134 2 2 96 1
0 0 306692 4016 4560 5372 0 0 0 3 257 35 1 1 98 0
The machine is vanilla 2.6.14, 256MB, 550MB swap.
% rpm -qf `which X`
xorg-x11-server-6.8.2-100
I wonder what precisely happened. Is this an X bug? Or a kernel bug?
The effect is reproducible.
Andries
next reply other threads:[~2006-05-07 19:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-05-07 19:31 Andries.Brouwer [this message]
2006-05-07 20:17 ` a Linux swap storm Jan Engelhardt
2006-05-07 20:37 ` Jesper Juhl
2006-05-08 3:23 ` Mike Galbraith
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