Re: [SLUG] linux grinding to a halt

[Christopher Booth <christopher.booth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 12:46:22 +1030 (CST)
"Glen Turner" <glen.turner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Christopher Booth wrote:
> 

> The machine is probably running out of memory and thrasing the disk
> because it is writing to swap. The I/O queues get very long, and any
> process that needs I/O stalls.  Anything else you do simply forces more
> memory to be paged in or out, worsening the I/O situation.  Eventually
> anything that needs memory stalls.
> 
> If you have enough swap then waiting a while, changing to the text console
> and killing the biggest memory hog will probably get the machine back.
> 
I couldn't even get any key strokes to register, to change to the text console

> The Linux 2.4 kernel is really horrible for this problem. The combination
> of poor virtual memory performance and high latency when doing disk I/O
> make swap thrashing a lot worse than it need be.
> 
> Your swap should be about double the amount of physical memory. Even then
> you will get some swap thrashing, this is why big UNIX machines have
> separate swap disks.
> 
That would be why, I have 128MB ram and 70 meg swap partition, I might have to create a secondary swap file.
Can a swap file reside on the fat16 partition as that is the only partition that I've got write access to with space on it?

Chris