https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=685777
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=685777#c12
--- Comment #12 from Mel Gorman 2011-11-01 17:37:39 UTC ---
Has swap been configured? Your test case is filling the system with 4G of
anonymous pages on a machine with 3G of RAM. If there is no swap configured, I
would expect it to go OOM due to overcommit being enabled by default. With swap
configured, it will grind heavily while it trashes swap for a while but should
recover eventually.
However, if you have wireless on this laptop, it is possible that the trashing
is due to trying to allocate order-1 pages for frames depending on the model of
card. Similarly, fork-heavy workloads require order-1 pages. On systems with a
lot of anonymous pages (such as your testcase) and without swap, 2.6.37 behaves
badly and can take an extremely long time to fork new processes because
basically it has little choice other than to wait for processes to exit.
Enabling swap mitigates this somewhat but there were also a number of changes
made between 2.6.37 and 3.1 related to allocating high-order pages quickly that
would make a noticeable difference. They are not likely to get backported
though any time soon.
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