Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 21:23:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu> To: Eric Yagerlener <eyager@novagate.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: vm_fault bug in 2.1.0? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970409212156.4997j-100000@localhost> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970408104952.199A-100000@localhost>
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On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, Eric Yagerlener wrote: > I have 32M of ram and and 27M of swap. The error is easily reproducable. > > I logged in as root and did the following command on a directory that > contained 35 files that were 11.6M long total and were compressed with > 'compress'. > > zcat * |less > > Things work well and I'm able to scroll through the files. I decide to go > searching for keywords through all these files using less's search > command. It works fine at first, but as you get closer to the end of the > files, things get gradually slower and slower. Finally it reaches the > point to where the system will suddenly do nothing but disk swapping, and > all other processes are completely dead in the water and eventually die > because of the lack of memory. However, less won't die and keeps on > thrashing away despite all the vm_faults it's generating. My guess is > that less is spawning a child process that will thrash the system until a > vm_fault occurs kills that child process, less will simply ignore it and > create another one that does the exact same thing an infinite amount of > times. It sounds more like a memory hole in less (trying to store the output of the zcat) than a VM system fault. Considering this is 2.1.0, I doubt we can do anything for you. If you can get a new system running 2.2.1 or newer to do it, then we might listen. > Apr 8 10:22:47 wolfden /kernel: Process 656 killed by vm_fault -- out of swap > > Is this the vm_fault bug that I heard mention of? No, that's the vm_fault function (trying to) save your bacon by killing processes. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major
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