Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 29 May 2003 16:38:28 +0200 | From | Matthias Mueller <> | Subject | Re: 2.4.20: Proccess stuck in __lock_page ... |
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On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 03:55:08PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > Hello ! > > I've done a few tests with -rc6 on my dev machine (dual xp 1.5G, 512 MB, scsi). > It's the *FIRST* time I have ever seen my mouse cursor hang (just a little bit > however, and totally acceptable) ! Usually, my kernel include -aa VM and lowlat > patches, and I've never encountered this behaviour on this machine with such a > configuration. However, with stock kernel, I admit that during the 2 minutes it > takes to write the 2G file, I see the mouse stick two or three times during > about 1 second, which is quite acceptable IMHO. Opening an xterm may take 10s > to get to the prompt (more annoying). Same to launch 'ps'. > > I use a fairly simple window manager (ctwm), which doesn't access the disk once > it's launched. It never gets stuck during all the operation if I disable the > swap. If I enable the swap, it sometimes takes one or two seconds to draw a > menu. The swap is used up to about 4 MB. > > I then tried -rc6 with ll_rw_blk from -rc5, and it's worse, even with swap > disabled. The hangs happen more often, but are about the same durations. So I > confirm that -rc6 is better here than -rc5. > > I retried with rc4aa1, and everything went very smooth again ; it takes at most > 1 second to get an xterm with the prompt ready, and ps responds immediately. So > I think that there are two things here: > - those who experience very long hangs may use a heavy window manager > which does continuous disk accesses (I mean it accesses the disk for any > simple operation). > - a hungry WM may also be swapped during such operations, rendering it > totally unusable, particularly if the swap is on the same physical disk > as the file being written to. > > So, could the people who report long hangs retry with swap disabled ? > Can we limit the amount of memory consummed by the cache during such a write ?
I run fluxbox, not a very heavy window manager, but I installed ctwm and tried again with vanilla 2.4.20. If I disabled swap the short hangs (1s) are gone, but the long mouse hangs (10s) are still there.
Matthias -- Matthias.Mueller@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de Rechenzentrum Universitaet Karlsruhe Abteilung Netze - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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