Messages in this thread |  | | From | Bruno Haible <> | Date | Thu, 12 Sep 1996 20:46:19 +0200 | Subject | swapping races |
| |
Hi,
Has anyone else observed these kinds of problems during/after heavy swapping activity?
1. Random g++ crashes, which go away as soon as you retry. 2. System hang/freeze just after a successful "swapoff -a".
My setup is: i486/33, 8 MB RAM, 10 MB swap partition + 7 MB swap file, 2 IDE disks, Mitsumi CD-ROM, kernel 2.0.6 without networking.
Detailed description:
1. During compilation of several hundred C++ files, g++ crashes on some of them with signal 11 or "internal compiler error". The compilation of each of these files needs about 10 to 17 megabytes memory. It swaps heavily. No way to reproduce the crashes: When "make" is restarted immediately afterwards, in the same environment, from the same "bash" process, it works fine - but then a similar error occurs a couple of files later. Under these circumstances, it doesn't seem to be g++ bug: Even the nastiest g++ bugs are usually reproducible. It is probably not a hardware problem: Bad RAM? No, gcc compilations (which need much less memory, hence rarely swap) don't show up these problems. Bad disk? No, I haven't had a single bad sector on these disks in 4 years.
This happens with kernel 2.0.6 as well as will 2.0.17.
2. In a situation where everything should fit in memory. "swapoff -a" goes like a breeze, "free" reports no used swap, but then - just a couple of seconds later - the mouse freezes, only Ctrl-Alt-+/- still work, and another couple of seconds later the system is completely frozen. The "swapoff" apparently had bad interaction with the X server.
Bruno <haible@ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de>
|  |