From: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
To: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:20:44 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20121206142044.GB18547@quack.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1353871800.22969.28.camel@soupermouf>
On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> > on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a
> > backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local
> > ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card).
> > Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the
> > system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile
> > is rarely touched.
>
> I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which
> needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell
> is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing
> small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The
> ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please
> advise!
Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be
interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I
remember right...
Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-12-06 14:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <1353851735.22969.18.camel@soupermouf>
2012-11-25 19:30 ` backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-11-25 22:41 ` kmemleak failure (was Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused) Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-11-25 23:19 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-11-25 22:59 ` backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused Roland Eggner
2012-11-25 23:56 ` Alan Cox
2012-11-26 3:11 ` Roland Eggner
2012-12-06 14:20 ` Jan Kara [this message]
2012-12-06 15:15 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-06 16:43 ` Jan Kara
2012-12-07 15:26 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-11-25 15:03 Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-02 12:44 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-02 22:50 ` Roland Eggner
2012-12-02 23:56 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-03 17:43 ` Theodore Ts'o
2012-12-03 18:47 ` Eric Paris
2012-12-03 19:35 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-03 20:00 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
2012-12-03 18:03 ` Roland Eggner
2012-12-03 19:25 ` Dimitrios Apostolou
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