Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 30 Jul 2005 07:44:50 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: 6.0 VFS/VM over-runs. Was: Apparent strange disk behaviour in 6.0
Message-ID:  <20050729214450.GB81215@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <42E94A88.4010603@elischer.org>
References:  <42E88135.30603@elischer.org> <42E88F2B.5000108@elischer.org> <20050728082844.GW46538@darkness.comp.waw.pl> <42E898A6.6010803@elischer.org> <20050728115251.GA20091@beatrix.daedalusnetworks.priv> <20050728135613.GD46538@darkness.comp.waw.pl> <42E93EE1.2090009@elischer.org> <42E94310.20806@samsco.org> <42E94A88.4010603@elischer.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[CC list pruned]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 02:13:44PM -0700, Julian Elischer wrote:
>file data written to cache to await output to disk is allowed to grow to 
>the extent that running programs are swapped out.
>(or at least paged out).

I don't see this on 5.3 either.  In multi-user mode (with lots of
other processes sitting aroung idle) vmstat shows fr and sr sit at
around 10,000/sec but there's no paging and a "ps -axl" afterwards
shows everything mostly still resident.  The active memory (avm)
hardly changes but free memory drops from 233MB to 20MB over 8 seconds
than oscillates between about 16MB and 30MB.  Disk I/O remains at
35-40MB/sec (ie disk limited).

This is an Athlon XP-1800 512MB RAM writing a 10GB file onto an ATA disk.
PREEMPTION is enabled.

Since Marc Olzheim reports it happens with 5-STABLE and Julian reports
it doesn't happen on 5.4 and I can't reproduce it on 5.3, one option
would seem to be that it was MFC'd to 5 at some point since 5.4 was
branched.  Unfortunately, a quick scan through the RELENG_5 commits
doesn't reveal anything that might be relevant.

The other possibility is that it's RAM size related.  The vmstat
output Julian posted demonstrating the problem was on a system with a
fair bit of RAM, but his 5.4 system is presumably smaller and my
system definitely is.

-- 
Peter



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050729214450.GB81215>