Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 7 Dec 2012 17:26:27 +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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Hi Jan, thanks for your help, with this commit I can't reproduce the problem. The problematic workload is no more inflating the ext4_inode_cache, in fact I've been able to run even heavier workloads with the ext4_inode_cache never surpassing 2-4MB.
Thanks everyone for helping, Dimitris
On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Jan Kara wrote: > On Thu 06-12-12 17:15:37, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: >> 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. > Strange. You are right gitweb doesn't show the SHA1 but I can see it in > my git repo I pulled from Linus. Anyway, I've attached the fix for your > convenience. > > Honza > > -- > Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> > SUSE Labs, CR >
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