Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 1 Jan 1999 03:52:35 +0000 ( ) | From | Aaron Lehmann <> | Subject | Re: good 2.1.x SMP kernel is? [possible smoking gun?] |
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It is very possible that your crashes are a result of swap < ram.
One of my friends has the same problem on 2.0.34. Being new to Linux/UNIX, he partitioned with 15 megabytes of swap on his 32 megabyte machine. Within an hour or so, the machine would crash. I helped him turn off swap permanently and it has been stable for the past week.
X Windows is a good stress test. X+GNOME+WM+Netscape amounted to so much bloat that thats what usually crashed the machine. Open a few million netscape proceses, and a few gimps or whatever until it crashes or no more processes will start due to lack of memory. If you get into a low memory situation, start browsing in one of the netscapes. Make sure it has a large RAM cache size :).
On Thu, 31 Dec 1998, John Kennedy wrote:
> 12/31/98 @ 10:32:18 AM (Thursday) > > Some more datapoints, and a possible smoking gun. > > After 2.2.0-pre1 came out, I put the 2nd processor back into the machine > and crashed it about 20 times trying to catch it in the act. > > The machine is stable, in general, if: > > o Only one of the two CPUs is used > o You mount the partitions as sync (not good test; can't stress it) > > Same (SMP) kernel, all other things held constant. > > > I spent most of yesterday trying to get it up on a serial console on the > theory that if it would spit out any messages on that, I wouldn't have them > disappear when the machine rebooted and/or otherwise froze. I never did > get it to output it to the console, but I did get one message on the VGA > console during one lockup (vs reboot): > > swap_duplicate: entry 0b190000, offset exceeds max > > Hmm. Swapping problems would happen while compiling but not under idle > use, so I tried to abuse that. I did repeated kernel builds under things > like -j32 and -j64 (both worked) where just -j failed (ran out of virtual > memory, didn't write down exact error; typical fork issue). > > Since this tends to happen an hour+ into my build, perhaps memory needs > to be more scrambled by use to trigger the problem. I have never seen > my new box use much swap, but that isn't surprising since I now have more > memory than I used to have combined memory & swap. > > > As I said, my ASUS P2B-DS is an upgrade over my previous system. The > previous system had 64MB of RAM, then was later upgraded to 96MB. The > new system has 256MB. I did keep the old disk drive, and was using the > old swap partition: > > Disk /dev/sdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1106 cylinders > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sdb6 326 338 104391 82 Linux swap > > No swap on /dev/sda. Sized Ok for 64MB and still more than 96, but > less than 256. The only reason I'm using that is because it was there > already and it seemed better than having no swap at all (at the time). > > That was ~2AM last night, so I did a swapoff -a and restarted the big > build. Got up this morning and it had finished it, no crashes (but > only one test; I rebuilt 6-9 times on one CPU before I decided that was > probably Ok). > > Am I getting crashes because I have less swap than physical memory? > > --- john > > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu > Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ >
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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