Messages in this thread | | | From | Denis Vlasenko <> | Subject | Re: why swap at all? | Date | Tue, 8 Jun 2004 08:29:35 +0300 |
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On Tuesday 08 June 2004 04:18, Tim Connors wrote: > I just got an interesting problem - possibly (or not?) related to > this: > > I have my laptop with 256MB of RAM, running 2.4.25-pre7, uptime 48 > days. Every morning, I come in and have to wait 2 minutes while > everything comes back into RAM, after the daily slocate. So I did a > swapoff -a, and it failed despite all the applications and cache and > tmpfs adding up to far less than 256MB (more like 128). > > I closed mozilla, which let me do a swapoff -a. > > All was well for a few days, but then thismorning, my partitions were > mounted ro, and an oops was in syslog at the same time as all the > slocate work: [alloc failures + oops snipped]
prolonged oom condition triggers lots of rarely user error paths in kernel (and applications). Most probably slocate hit one of bugs still living in one of them.
> So OOM - but why? The cache was registering 65MB used. > 24353,23> cat /proc/meminfo > total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: > Mem: 262647808 256618496 6029312 0 4820992 67239936 > Swap: 0 0 0 > MemTotal: 256492 kB > MemFree: 5888 kB > MemShared: 0 kB > Buffers: 4708 kB > Cached: 65664 kB > SwapCached: 0 kB > Active: 77944 kB > Inactive: 142308 kB > HighTotal: 0 kB > HighFree: 0 kB > LowTotal: 256492 kB > LowFree: 5888 kB > SwapTotal: 0 kB > SwapFree: 0 kB
Maybe this is not the state of the meminfo at the time of oom condition. oops killed the task and had freed its memory, which is now used by cache.
> Why was it so eager to kill applications, and not reclaim some of that > swap space? Is this a problem that is known on 2.4, and can't be fixed > (I can't use 2.6 on my laptop yet, far too many problems to even > start - eg the suspend to ram on APM thread). > > Is there another output of a /proc file you want? I'll try not to get > the urge to use/reboot the box in the meantime.
vmstat log of this event may be useful. -- vda - 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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