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Date:      Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:56:52 +0000
From:      "John" <lists@reiteration.net>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: swapfile being eaten by unknown process
Message-ID:  <20050215151712.M67335@reiteration.net>
In-Reply-To: <20050215043554.GA83537@dan.emsphone.com>
References:  <20050215012633.M48733@reiteration.net> <20050215024139.GA97764@xor.obsecurity.org> <20050215043554.GA83537@dan.emsphone.com>

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On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:35:55 -0600, Dan Nelson wrote
> In the last episode (Feb 14), Kris Kennaway said:
> > On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 01:30:42AM +0000, John wrote:
> > > Is there a way of seeing *what* program/process is eating swap.
> > > There are loads of ways of seeing that it is being eaten, but so
> > > far haven't found a way of knowing what eats, so can't fix the
> > > problem. Can anyone enlighten me?
> > 
> > Use ps or top, and look for the process with the huge size.  This is
> > not foolproof, because a process can allocate memory without using it
> > (e.g. rpc.statd), but it's a place to start.  If you see a process
> > that is both large, and paging to/from disk, that's a better
> > indication.
> 
> To see which processes are paging: run top, hit 'm' to switch modes,
> and hit 'o' then 'fault' to sort the processes by how many page 
> faults they are doing.  This isn't completely foolproof either,
>  since reads from mmap()ed files count as faults as well.

Hi

Thanks for your input so far. Here is the output from top:

last pid: 59737;  load averages:  0.02,  0.03,  0.00    up 1+18:32:57  15:16:36
82 processes:  1 running, 79 sleeping, 2 zombie
CPU states:  0.4% user,  0.0% nice,  0.4% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.2% idle
Mem: 105M Active, 31M Inact, 61M Wired, 144K Cache, 33M Buf, 33M Free
Swap: 455M Total, 86M Used, 369M Free, 18% Inuse

  PID USERNAME       WRITE  FAULT  TOTAL PERCENT COMMAND
  177 root             0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% adjkerntz
59693 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back
59692 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back
59663 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back
59662 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back
59658 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back
59657 www              0      0      0      0      0      0   0.00% speedy_back

[...]

lots of other processes but all with 0s. occasionally I will see numbers under
VCSW  IVCSW   READ  but they just flash on then its back to 0 again. I need to
look up what those 2 processes are doing zombified.

I think I just need more RAM, but I'd expect there to be none free before it
starts eating swap. Why with free RAM wouldn't my swap also be liberated?

cheers
--
lists@reiteration.net



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