Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:55:07 +0100 From: "Colin J. Raven" <colin@kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl> To: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Illogical usage of swap Message-ID: <20050316123901.U2949@kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl>
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Perhaps this resonates with someone, I sure hope so. We bought and deployed a new server recently. Owing to various combinations of nics/raid controllers lack of support, instead of installing 5.3 we installed 4.11. The motherboard is a tyan tiger i7320s5350, dual Xeon 3.0GHz w/1MB cache and an moderately impressive 4GB of RAM. Hyperthreading *is* enabled, here's a sysctl hw snapshot: gonzo# sysctl -a |grep hw hw.machine: i386 hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz hw.ncpu: 4 #other stuff that may be meaningful to someone: hw.physmem: 3618050048 hw.usermem: 3261022208 hw.pagesize: 4096 hw.floatingpoint: 1 hw.machine_arch: i386 hw.aac.iosize_max: 65536 hw.an.an_dump: off #and so on..... Hard to believe, but this beast is swapping. Here's a typical top snapshot: load averages: 0.75, 0.36, 0.23 up 14+12:39:04 12:40:02 128 processes: 1 running, 125 sleeping, 2 zombie CPU states: 7.5% user, 0.0% nice, 1.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 91.2% idle Mem: 479M Active, 2470M Inact, 337M Wired, 101M Cache, 199M Buf, 5468K Free Swap: 8192M Total, 116K Used, 8192M Free The box is replacing a machine with dual AMD athlon MP CPU's and 1GB of RAM. The old box never swapped once, though then - as now - free memory dipped down into numbers we weren't comfortable with occasionally. The old box *was* quite heavily loaded at times so this wasn't so surprising. The new "superbox" however doesn't even have some stuff running on it that the old one had! So under no circumstances could the workload on the new box be described as heavy. Can anyone suggest *anything* that might cause this uttely illogical situation to exist? We're frankly baffled. Regards & TIA, -Colin -- Colin J. Raven Wed Mar 16 12:54:00 CET 2005
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