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To: John Hay <jhay@mikom.csir.co.za>
cc: nox@jelal.hb.north.de (Juergen Lock), stable@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: lockups. 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 25 Jun 1996 08:41:06 +0200."
             <199606250641.IAA12711@zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@root.com>
Reply-To: davidg@root.com
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 00:12:09 -0700
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>> And the (swap) disk(s) are busy no end?  thats what i got this weekend
>> having just updated the kernel...  then yesterday i looked what actually
>> had changed (not that much), and this is what i'm running now:
>> 
>> Index: src/sys/vm/vm_pageout.c
>[ patch deleted ]
>
>I also got this heavy swapping with a -stable kernel built on Saturday.
>It got so bad that we could not work anymore and I had to revert to an
>old kernel.

   Other than consistency checks, the only change that has been made to the
pageout daemon was last Wednesday when the RSS limiting code was #if 0'd.
The code shouldn't have come into play on most systems (since the default
limit is 1/2 of all memory). The problem is that it might not be safe due to
the recursive calling nature of the functions that do the trimming and because
it walks through the 'allproc' list in a potentially dangerous manner.
   You could try to enable it and see if this is the "night and day"
difference that you're describing. Change the #if 0 to a #if 1 at the end of
/sys/vm/vm_pageout.c.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project