Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 15:20:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Worst case swapping. Message-ID: <200006112220.PAA29235@apollo.backplane.com> References: <14660.3153.658226.142964@trooper.velocet.net>
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:I'm running a 700Mhz K7 with 256M of RAM as my workstation. I have
:two fast SCSI drives with a Gig of swap between them. The system
:shouldn't normally be a bottleneck as a workstation.
:
:I find, however, that there seem to be some bad worst-case senerios
:popping up rather often.
:...
ps axl. There must be stuff running on your system eating active
memory other then just the browser.
I have a 64MB workstation and run netscape on it all the time. Idled-out
xterm's only take a second or so to swap-in after I've been doing other
things / browsing for a while.
:What I'm talking about is a situation where some portion of the
:application will be swapped out and then when the application becomes
:active again, the swap will grind heavily reading and writing for
:10-20 seconds (pushing 5M/s out and 5M/s in).
This can only happen if the programs running on the machine are eating
more active memory then you have available. It should be possible to
determine what is going on using 'vmstat 1' and 'ps axl'.
:Now the application in question (Netscape) usually runs around 50 to
:75 megs, so that swapping activity is effectively swapping an amount
50-75MB is a lot, but if you have 256MB of ram it can't be the cause
unless there are other active things eating similar amounts of ram.
It kinda sounds like a runaway to me. A ps axl during these heavy
paging periods should shed some light on the problem.
-Matt
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