From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 20:51:58 -0300 Subject: kswapd eating too much CPU on ac16/ac18 Message-ID: <20000613205158.A9782@cesarb.personal> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline From: Cesar Eduardo Barros Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: I've seen this behavior both in ac16 and in ac18. ac4 worked fine (and was the fastest kernel I've ever seen on that box) The box is a 386SX25, with 8MB RAM. The problem is that kswapd eats 99.0% of the CPU while running dpkg (I also made it happen with X). dpkg uses 10MB of memory in a particulary awful access pattern (so it swaps a lot). ac4 was faster than ever, it looked like it wasn't swapping at all ac16 and ac18 are both awful, dpkg takes an infinite time, all of it dominated by kswapd (running top -s and vmstat 1 at the same time). When the problem happens everything seems to hang (vmstat lumps some seconds into one, as I can see in the interrupt count), no disk activity happens (as if it was lost thinking what to do next), and on the next update I can see kswapd ate an awful amount of CPU (ok, top eats 20% CPU on that box, but why would ac4 remain pretty responsive when ac16/ac18 stop to a halt?) It's not zone related (only 8Mb of memory) To reproduce: use mem=8M (or use a box like mine ;) ) and run dpkg --list (or even better, try to install something using dpkg) I think new VM ideas should always be tested with mem=8M and a dpkg run... -- Cesar Eduardo Barros cesarb@nitnet.com.br cesarb@dcc.ufrj.br -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/