Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 17:42:55 -0500 From: Jim Bryant <kc5vdj@yahoo.com> To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Cc: Josef Karthauser <joe@tao.org.uk>, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Disk I/O problems with -current. Message-ID: <3B82E3EF.2030000@yahoo.com> References: <20010820115207.B1696@tao.org.uk> <20010821125435.G17739@xor.obsecurity.org>
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Kris Kennaway wrote: > On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 11:52:07AM +0100, Josef Karthauser wrote: > >>I'm having strange problems with -current on a laptop with 64mb of >>memory. Periodically "things go strange" [tm]. >> >>Because of the lack of memory I'm using a fair amount of swap. >> >>Everything runs smoothly up until a point, which seems to depend upon >>not running too many large processes for too long. Then the file system >>grinds to a halt for seconds at a time. Some processes run, and others >>just hang. >> > > Yes, I see almost exactly the same thing (except that I haven't > noticed any processes which stay running during the freeze -- things > like keyboard and mouse activity in X or the console always freeze). > Mine could well be swap related too, though I have 128MB of memory. > > I really think developers should be made to run -current on an old, > slow, crippled machines so they notice this kind of thing which would > be lost in the noise on their fast machines :-) I've also noticed this... Sunday and yesterday, I deleted ALL installed -ports and -packages thinking that the meinproc issue with kde-2.2 was being caused by conflicts in libraries and/or include files [it's not either] on this system which has had about three years since a good clean scrubbing... While I was busy recompiling the basics, I noted that the disk activity would stop, and the console become non-responsive, yet there was no panic or other kernel message. This was happening consistantly for about 12 hours or so, and I had to back down from 5 or 6 parallel -ports compiles to one and two in parallel. I also have noted that when switching VTY [by hand, or when exiting X] the system would panic on mwrite and give message about the possibility of buffers being wierded out POSSIBLY [the message was a question]. I also noted on several instances that the "freezes" would occur when there is heavy disk and CPU activity combined with network access [this may or may not be a contributing factor, I don't know] such as fetching a distribution file. I have also noticed extreme slowness when disk activity occurs. top will show almost no CPU being used, but when there is something being copied or moved, everything becomes REALLY sluggish. This has only been noticed in kernels of the last month or so. Tyan S1696-DLUA MoBo, 2 ATAPI busses in use 20G-pri-master, 12G-pri-slave, HP burner sec-master, 2 SCSI-UW busses in use ST15150W dedicated bus, NEC CD-ROM and HP DDS2 on second bus, LinkSys [dc0] 10/100 ethernet, DEC DEFPA SAS UTP-PMD, SB-Live!/Value, Hauppauge WinTV/Theatre. dual P-II/333's, 512Megs SDRAM. Matrox MGA-G200 AGP. USB CompactFlash/SmartMedia reader. -CURRENT as of 3am CDT today. I noticed a lot of changes last night, especially in the vm code, and I'll wait and see if this fixes anything I've noted... Man them cvsup servers were slow this morning! jim -- ET has one helluva sense of humor! He's always anal-probing right-wing schizos! _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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