Re: Ongoing 2.4 VM suckage

Luigi Genoni
2001-08-06T13:23:17Z

with 2.4.5 i had similar problems with 4 GB RAM on a 4-processor
sparc64.
2.4.6 solved my problems.

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001 jlnance@intrex.net wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 07:27:42PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
> >
> > > I'm telling you that's not what happens. When memory pressure
> > > gets really high, the kernel takes all the CPU time and the box
> > > is completely useless. Maybe the VM sorts itself out but after
> > > five minutes of barely responding, I usually just power cycle
> > > the damn thing. As I said, this isn't a classic thrash because
> > > the swap disks only blip perhaps once every ten seconds!
> >
> > What kind of workload are you running ?
> >
> > We could be dealing with some weird artifact of
> > virtual page scanning here, or with a strange
> > side effect of recent VM changes ...
>
> Rik,
> FWIW, I am seeing this sort of thing too, though I am running a 2.4.5
> kernel so I am a little out of date. Its a large machine with 2G of ram,
> 4G of swap, and 2 CPUs. You dont have to actually use all the memory either.
> When my process gets to about 1.5G and starts doing lots of file I/O, the
> machine can just disappear for several minutes. I will be sshed in and
> I can not even get my shell to give me a new prompt when I hit return. It
> will eventually sort it self out, but it might take 15 minutes. I will try
> and get a more recent kernel installed, but the machine is not under my
> control, so I dont get to decide when that happens.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jim
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