On 6 Jun 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

Derek Glidden [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

The problem I reported is not that 2.4 uses huge amounts of swap but
that trying to recover that swap off of disk under 2.4 can leave the
machine in an entirely unresponsive state, while 2.2 handles identical
situations gracefully.

The interesting thing from other reports is that it appears to be kswapd
using up CPU resources.  Not the swapout code at all.  So it appears
to be a fundamental VM issue.  And calling swapoff is just a good way
to trigger it.

If you could confirm this by calling swapoff sometime other than at
reboot time.  That might help.  Say by running top on the console.

The thing goes comatose here too. SCHED_RR vmstat doesn't run, console
switch is nogo...

After running his memory hog, swapoff took 18 seconds.  I hacked a
bleeder valve for dead swap pages, and it dropped to 4 seconds.. still
utterly comatose for those 4 seconds though.

	-Mike

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