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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
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Lenz Grimmer