From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat May 10 22:39:01 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A2C6037B401 for ; Sat, 10 May 2003 22:39:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ion.gank.org (ion.gank.org [198.78.66.164]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F369743F85 for ; Sat, 10 May 2003 22:39:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from craig@xfoil.gank.org) Received: from localhost (ion.gank.org [198.78.66.164]) by ion.gank.org (GankMail) with ESMTP id E520D2CFBD; Sun, 11 May 2003 00:38:54 -0500 (CDT) Received: from ion.gank.org ([198.78.66.164]) by localhost (ion.gank.org [198.78.66.164]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 26669-04; Sun, 11 May 2003 00:38:54 -0500 (CDT) Received: from aldaris2.auir.gank.org (dsl081-113-221.dfw1.dsl.speakeasy.net [64.81.113.221]) by ion.gank.org (GankMail) with ESMTP id B80362C5DF; Sun, 11 May 2003 00:38:53 -0500 (CDT) From: Craig Boston To: Paul Richards , current@freebsd.org Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 00:38:56 -0500 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.1 References: <1052570246.27195.6.camel@cf.freebsd-services.com> In-Reply-To: <1052570246.27195.6.camel@cf.freebsd-services.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200305110038.56729.craig@xfoil.gank.org> Subject: Re: Interrupt latency problems X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 05:39:01 -0000 On Saturday 10 May 2003 07:37 am, Paul Richards wrote: > I'm having real problems with current with heavy disk activity. > > When working in X and updating ports which causes a lot of disk activity > I get *very* poor interactive responses. Keypresses can not appear for > seconds and mouse movement is very jerky and unresponsive. Can you watch top or gkrellm or something to see if any swapping is occurring during the times when it's unresponsive? It may be hard to get stats out of top while it's frozen, but you might be able to see if any processes in sbwait or a similar status. Sometimes I have very similar symptoms that I THINK are the result of X getting swapped out. On my machine, X likes to grow to outrageous memory sizes (300M+) and because it's so big parts of it get swapped out when there's memory pressure. Sometimes, especially during heavy disk activity and almost always if something's both disk and RAM intensive (like cvsup), the system will become almost totally unresponsive for up to 30 seconds. Mouse lags, keyboard input not showing up, windows not becoming focused when I move the mouse over them, etc. From what I can tell it looks like X is desperately trying to access parts of it that are swapped to disk and is competing with the disk-intensive process trying to read its pages in, causing bad disk thrashing... I usually have to restart X every few days to keep it from getting too big. This happens to me even with backing store and save-unders both DISABLED. Your problem may caused by something completely different, but the symptoms do seem quite similar. Craig