From: Scott Anderson <scott_anderson@mvista.com>
To: Chuck Lever <cel@netapp.com>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: vm_enough_memory() and RAM disks
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 17:45:20 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <3B0BF730.9D262F52@mvista.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <NFBBLKEIKLGDCJAAAEKOKEDPCAAA.cel@netapp.com>
Chuck Lever wrote:
>
> i've noticed a (possibly) related problem.
>
> i've configured an NFS server to export a largish RAM disk for
> the purposes of testing NFS performance. the RAM disk is half
> as large as the server's physical memory. i've seen several
> times that when the machine runs out of memory (the "free"
> column in vmstat output goes below 1M) and the kernel wants
> to swap, the system freezes up. my theory was that something
> was attempting to flush buffers, but because the buffers were
> bh_protected (because they were part of a large RAM disk), the
> kernel wasn't successful at making any normal headway, and so
> it looped.
I believe you are seeing the same problem. I'm guessing that you're
on 2.2 because you didn't mention the Out Of Memory killer coming
into play. If so, you can work around the problem by playing with
/proc/sys/vm/buffermem to increase the minimum amount of buffermem.
This has been removed from 2.4.
Of course, the real answer is to fix the code, but I must apologize
again that I haven't found the time to do that...
Scott Anderson
scott_anderson@mvista.com MontaVista Software Inc.
(408)328-9214 1237 East Arques Ave.
http://www.mvista.com Sunnyvale, CA 94085
--
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/
prev parent reply other threads:[~2001-05-23 17:45 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2001-05-22 20:24 Scott Anderson
2001-05-23 1:32 ` Chuck Lever
2001-05-23 17:45 ` Scott Anderson [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=3B0BF730.9D262F52@mvista.com \
--to=scott_anderson@mvista.com \
--cc=cel@netapp.com \
--cc=linux-mm@kvack.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox