From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 1 09:09:56 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6251F16A420 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2006 09:09:56 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from pobox@verysmall.org) Received: from thing.verysmall.org (thing.verysmall.org [212.100.226.116]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8110343D49 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2006 09:09:55 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from pobox@verysmall.org) Received: (qmail 60433 invoked by uid 89); 1 Mar 2006 09:32:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ?127.0.0.1?) (iavor.raytchev@verysmall.org@130.83.72.239) by thing.verysmall.org with SMTP; 1 Mar 2006 09:32:26 -0000 Message-ID: <440564D9.7030207@verysmall.org> Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 10:09:45 +0100 From: "pobox@verysmall.org" User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5 (Windows/20051201) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kris Kennaway References: <44046959.4080901@verysmall.org> <20060228194032.GA85006@xor.obsecurity.org> In-Reply-To: <20060228194032.GA85006@xor.obsecurity.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: swap_pager X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:09:56 -0000 Kris Kennaway wrote: > On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 04:16:41PM +0100, pobox@verysmall.org wrote: >> I am running FreeBSD 5.4 in VMware using USB 1.1 external HDD as a disk, >> which means quite slow I/O. It works fine for my needs, I only get >> >> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: device: da0s1f, blkno: xxx, size: xxx >> >> when performing heavy operations, such as rsync of a 1 GB database dump >> file. >> >> All references to the problem I found point out hardware failure. Could, >> however, the problem be simply that the I/O does not manage to let the >> request go through within the 20 seconds wait time and that the hardware >> is OK (apart from the fact that I/O is slow? And - is this message just >> a notice, or does it mean that I get data corruption? > > Yes, it just means "operation did not complete within the arbitrarily > chosen time period", and by itself it doesn't mean there exists any > further problem. If the operation didn't complete because the drive > threw it away, has bad blocks, etc, that would be a problem. In your > case it's likely to just be the slow disk. > > Kris Kris, thanks for the clarification! Best, Iv