From owner-freebsd-current Sun Jun 11 15:20:48 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0ACC437BA9D; Sun, 11 Jun 2000 15:20:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id PAA29235; Sun, 11 Jun 2000 15:20:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 15:20:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200006112220.PAA29235@apollo.backplane.com> To: David Gilbert Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Worst case swapping. References: <14660.3153.658226.142964@trooper.velocet.net> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message