Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 6 Dec 2012 17:15:37 +0200 (EET) | From | Dimitrios Apostolou <> | Subject | Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused |
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On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Jan Kara wrote: > On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: >> On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: >>> on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a >>> backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local >>> ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card). >>> Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the >>> system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile >>> is rarely touched. >> >> I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which >> needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell >> is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing >> small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The >> ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please >> advise! > Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be > interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I > remember right...
Thanks, I appreciate your help as I'm stuck in a dead end now, and I've been trying to write some debug hook that prints all ext4_inodes and the reason they are pinned (is there an easy way to find this out?).
So maybe there is a typo in the SHA1 sum you provided? Gitweb can't find it in Linus' tree.
Thanks, Dimitris
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