Re: 2.6.14.5 / swapping / killing random apps

[Trilight <trilight@ns666.com>]

Jesper Juhl wrote:
> On 12/29/05, Trilight <trilight@ns666.com> wrote:
> 
>>Hiya all,
>>
>>I was wondering about the following;
>>
>>
>>kernel: 2.6.14.5 / vanilla
>>
>>If a system with say a swap of 2GB on a fast drive and like 260MB is
>>actively used for swapping, could it cause certain applications to crash
>>?
> 
> 
> It shouldn't.
> 
> 
> 
>>I noticed that the when swapping occurs, usualy above 200MB then
>>random apps start to crash. Sometimes gnome-terminal, gnome-panel,
>>xchat, metacity and so on. It happens a few times in usually 48 hours.
>>
>>The system has 512MB ram, ECC , checked and cleared. The system can be
>>booted with m$ xp or freebsd but crashes do not occur even under heavy
>>load. So that's why i'm thinking something is causing this behaviour in
>>linux. I also have to say that dmcrypt was used for the swap but that
>>caused the crashes to increase, so dmcrypt is not used anymore just a
>>normal swap and crashes decreased to "rare" within 24 hours.
>>
> 
> 
>>Or is it "normal" that the crash risk of running apps increases the more
>>swapping is done ?
>>
> 
> No.  Not unless you exhaust *all* you RAM+Swap - if the machine goes
> OOM then the OOM-Killer will kick in and kill one or more applications
> in order to keep the system alive, but from your description (only
> 260MB Swap used out of 2GB) that does not seem to be the case here.
> 
> 
> 
>>I plan to upgrade the memory to 1.5GB anyway, but this issue is kinda
>>bothering me.
>>
>>Thanks in advance for any input !
>>
> 
> 
> Only thing I can think of would be a corrupted swap
> partition/swap-file or bad blocks on the harddrive in the areas used
> to hold the swap. That could be one possible explanation and would
> also explain that other OS's on your box doesn't crash since they
> don't use the same parts of the disk for swap.
> 
> Maybe someone else has other possible explanations.
> 
> 
> --
> Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
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> 


Thanks for your reply !

I just did bad block check and it turns out to be good.

If there is anything else i can check i'm all ears hehe