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Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 09:36:25 +0100 (CET)
From: Zbigniew Szalbot <zbyszek@szalbot.homedns.org>
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To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: periodic, short freezes
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Hello,

On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> The fact that swap is in use, together with your description,
> indicates that your system is overloaded; those transient loads are
> causing it to periodically demand more working memory than is backed
> by RAM, so the system goes into a frenzy of swapping trying to
> accomodate, and system performance falls in the toilet until the load
> goes away.
>
> Add more RAM or limit the workload.

Now that something to check - thank you very much Kris. Is that so that on 
a typical system with enough memory to do its job there is no swap use on 
average? From what I can tell swap is always used to some extent but I 
have checked another system and swap use there is 0%. So you may be right 
that this is the problem.

Jonathan - what is your swap use? Cause you also experience this kind of 
problem...

Thanks!

-- 
Zbigniew Szalbot