On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

The most probable reason for the stalls is the fact that
page_launder (like shrink_cache) will try to write out
the complete inactive list if it's almost full of dirty
pages, so the system will still be stuck in __get_request_wait
seconds after the first few megabytes of the paged out
inactive pages have been cleaned already.

I doubt if it's that, although it might be.

It happens just during a kernel build, 768M of RAM.  And/or
during big CVS operations.  Possibly it's due to ext3 checkpointing.

Indeed, my scenario above is unlikely to be the reason with
these workloads.

However, I have noticed the problem with fillmem, or just
when the system has the sudden urge to swapout a large
process ;)

regards,

Rik
-- 
Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH".

http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/

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