From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 6 Jun 2001 09:12:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 6 Jun 2001 09:12:44 -0400 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:43563 "EHLO flinx.biederman.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 6 Jun 2001 09:12:30 -0400 To: "Jeffrey W. Baker" Cc: Derek Glidden , Subject: Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps In-Reply-To: From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 06 Jun 2001 07:08:37 -0600 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org "Jeffrey W. Baker" writes: > On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Derek Glidden wrote: > > > > > After reading the messages to this list for the last couple of weeks and > > playing around on my machine, I'm convinced that the VM system in 2.4 is > > still severely broken. > > > > This isn't trying to test extreme low-memory pressure, just how the > > system handles recovering from going somewhat into swap, which is a real > > day-to-day problem for me, because I often run a couple of apps that > > most of the time live in RAM, but during heavy computation runs, can go > > a couple hundred megs into swap for a few minutes at a time. Whenever > > that happens, my machine always starts acting up afterwards, so I > > started investigating and found some really strange stuff going on. > > I reboot each of my machines every week, to take them offline for > intrusion detection. I use 2.4 because I need advanced features of > iptables that ipchains lacks. Because the 2.4 VM is so broken, and > because my machines are frequently deeply swapped, they can sometimes take > over 30 minutes to shutdown. They hang of course when the shutdown rc > script turns off the swap. The first few times this happened I assumed > they were dead. Interesting. Is it constant disk I/O? Or constant CPU utilization. In any case you should be able to comment that line out of your shutdown rc script and be in perfectly good shape. Eric