[Bug 582264] Re: lucid lynx going into disk activity frenzy, stalls for minutes

Josef Grahn 582264 at bugs.launchpad.net
Sun Aug 29 10:29:56 UTC 2010


I can confirm this phenomenon on a Dell Dimension with a Pentium D CPU,
2G RAM, running a 64 bit kernel and nVidia card with official nVidia
driver. Swappiness is set to 10.

It appears the system is swapping intensely when it becomes
unresponsive, and sometimes freezes for several minutes with only
occasional mouse pointer updates. The %iowait of the CPU is typically
above 80 during these episodes. It usually happens when running some
memory intensive application(s) (e.g. Chrome with many tabs, Eclipse or
VirtualBox), so it could very well be caused by an actual shortage of
RAM (disappointingly meaning 2 GB is only sufficient for casual desktop
use nowadays).

I would however generally have expected the kernel to handle the
resource shortage better, and not effectively suspend every running
process, as well as mouse and keyboard input, for up to ten minutes.
Especially at times when only one of the memory hungry applications is
being actively used, as the others should be able to be swapped out
completely leaving enough free RAM.

-- 
lucid lynx going into disk activity frenzy, stalls for minutes 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/582264
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