From owner-freebsd-current@freebsd.org Sat Mar 26 21:26:55 2016 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 46CADADD8D1 for ; Sat, 26 Mar 2016 21:26:55 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Received: from gw.catspoiler.org (unknown [IPv6:2602:304:b010:ef20::f2]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "gw.catspoiler.org", Issuer "gw.catspoiler.org" (not verified)) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 25EEE1966; Sat, 26 Mar 2016 21:26:55 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Received: from FreeBSD.org (mousie.catspoiler.org [192.168.101.2]) by gw.catspoiler.org (8.15.2/8.15.2) with ESMTP id u2QLQjT0079960; Sat, 26 Mar 2016 14:26:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from truckman@FreeBSD.org) Message-Id: <201603262126.u2QLQjT0079960@gw.catspoiler.org> Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 14:26:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Don Lewis Subject: Re: CURRENT slow and shaky network stability To: imb@protected-networks.net cc: ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de, kmacy@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <56F6C6B0.6010103@protected-networks.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 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: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 21:26:55 -0000 On 26 Mar, Michael Butler wrote: > -current is not great for interactive use at all. The strategy of > pre-emptively dropping idle processes to swap is hurting .. big time. > > Compare inactive memory to swap in this example .. > > 110 processes: 1 running, 108 sleeping, 1 zombie > CPU: 1.2% user, 0.0% nice, 4.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 94.5% idle > Mem: 474M Active, 1609M Inact, 764M Wired, 281M Buf, 119M Free > Swap: 4096M Total, 917M Used, 3178M Free, 22% Inuse > > PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU > COMMAND > 1819 imb 1 28 0 213M 11284K select 1 147:44 5.97% > gkrellm > 59238 imb 43 20 0 980M 424M select 0 10:07 1.92% > firefox > > .. it shouldn't start randomly swapping out processes because they're > used infrequently when there's more than enough RAM to spare .. I don't know what changed, and probably something can use some tweaking, but paging out idle processes isn't always the wrong thing to do. For instance if I'm using poudriere to build a bunch of packages and its heavy use of tmpfs is pushing the machine into many GB of swap usage, I don't want interactive use like: vi foo.c cc foo.c vi foo.c to suffer because vi and cc have to be read in from a busy hard drive each time while unused console getty and idle sshd processes in a bunch of jails are still hanging on to memory even though they haven't executed any instructions since shortly after the machine was booted weeks ago. > It also shows up when trying to reboot .. on all of my gear, 90 seconds > of "fail-safe" time-out is no longer enough when a good proportion of > daemons have been dropped onto swap and must be brought back in to flush > their data segments :-( That's a different and known problem. See: