-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, I am desperately looking for clues on a very strange behaviour that I now have experienced with openSUSE 10.3 for several times now (actually, every 2-3 days on my Laptop, which is my primary workstation and up 24x7). The system works fine for 1-2 days, then all the sudden it becomes less and less responsive due to massive swap activity. Looking at the output of vmstat and free, I observe that the VM decided to swap out large amounts of memory pages, while there still was plenty of RAM freely available (not used for buffers or cache). So the system ends up with over half of the RAM being marked as free, while the swap has filled up quite significantly. This makes the system become *very* sluggish. It happened to me several times now that I returned to my desk in the morning and the system was completely unresponsive and the disk was rattling as mad. Only a hard reboot helped to regain control (Since I can't always wait ~1 hour for the Alt+SysRq+E to take effect). I filed a bug report about this a few days ago, it would be great if some kernel expert could investigate this and let me know, what other information I need to provide. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=340143 I toyed around with various swappiness values, but they don't seem to make a difference. Interestingly, even setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness to "0" does not completely prohibit the system from swapping, while there still is plenty of free memory available: lenz@metis:~> uname -a Linux metis 2.6.22.12-0.1-default #1 SMP 2007/11/06 23:05:18 UTC i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux lenz@metis:~> uptime 8:59pm up 10:54, 7 users, load average: 0.58, 0.61, 0.63 lenz@metis:~> cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 0 lenz@metis:~> free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1035332 1014084 21248 0 87160 197488 - -/+ buffers/cache: 729436 305896 Swap: 1253028 131076 1121952 lenz@metis:~> cat /proc/vmstat nr_free_pages 5250 nr_inactive 26913 nr_active 214996 nr_anon_pages 169683 nr_mapped 29874 nr_file_pages 79046 nr_dirty 721 nr_writeback 0 nr_slab_reclaimable 2394 nr_slab_unreclaimable 3436 nr_page_table_pages 965 nr_unstable 0 nr_bounce 0 nr_vmscan_write 135771 pgpgin 25483536 pgpgout 10607861 pswpin 14777 pswpout 36166 pgalloc_dma 169320 pgalloc_normal 29403345 pgalloc_high 2876515 pgfree 32454506 pgactivate 1380976 pgdeactivate 1156011 pgfault 35317571 pgmajfault 13960 pgrefill_dma 571625 pgrefill_normal 29974997 pgrefill_high 5063004 pgsteal_dma 91237 pgsteal_normal 7634076 pgsteal_high 333204 pgscan_kswapd_dma 191877 pgscan_kswapd_normal 7868615 pgscan_kswapd_high 430492 pgscan_direct_dma 3991 pgscan_direct_normal 289792 pgscan_direct_high 19388 pginodesteal 6 slabs_scanned 4068352 kswapd_steal 7819731 kswapd_inodesteal 17211 pageoutrun 132841 allocstall 3593 pgrotated 115105 Is there anything else you need? Any help would be appreciated - I don't seem to be the only one experiencing this. I spotted one message on the general openSUSE List, and there was a thread on this list about "Resume take a long time to bring in the images to main memory" which sounded like it may suffer from the same problem. Thanks! Bye, LenZ - -- - ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lenz Grimmer <lenz@grimmer.com> -o) [ICQ: 160767607 | Jabber: LenZGr@jabber.org] /\\ http://www.lenzg.org/ V_V -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHQe0FSVDhKrJykfIRAlW9AJ9/+lp+g311lHy1z7byMq0AZyLHoACfYuxF J7kLQb5fjAjQaXHQhjsBm7Y= =mpMz -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+help@opensuse.org