[Bug 367377] Re: High load average, disk read, no apparent reason - 2.6.28-11

[Rocko]

I don't know if this is specifically an intel bug. I sometimes see the
same thing occur and I'm using nvidia.

It happened again just now: the PC was doing nothing all night, but when
I returned to it and pressed a key to stop the screensaver, X had become
unresponsive due to disk thrashing. I could actually see X trying to
redraw the screen background pixel by pixel (it finally gave up). The
unresponsiveness showed no sign of abating after 20 minutes, but I
eventually managed to ssh in. The culprit must have been firefox (1.2GB
usage according to atop) because killing it fixed the problem. Oddly
around 900 MB of swap was being used even though the top two memory
processes were FF and VirtualBox, using only around 2.5 GB out of my 4
GB RAM. The 900 MB swap could have been left over from a swap load test
I did 36 hours earlier - but I would have expected the swap to be freed
once no longer required sometime in those 36 hours.

For reference, I found that the 2.6.28 kernel would always 'lock up' as
soon as swap was hit, eg if I tried to run two VM's using 1.5 GB each.
So I have been using the 2.6.30 kernel with the patch in
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309#c366. My initial
testing showed that the 2.6.30 kernel so far generally works much better
when swap is hit (eg by running two or more VMs), and the patch improves
things further.

So there seem to be several problems: (1) memory leaks in some programs,
(2) poor management of swap, (3) poor management of scheduling under
heavy disk I/O.

** Bug watch added: Linux Kernel Bug Tracker #12309
   http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309

-- 
High load average, disk read, no apparent reason - 2.6.28-11
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/367377
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