Mem usage at 100%, swap usage climbing... system is dying!

[madmango]

Every once in awhile I get it in my mind to backup my filesystems to a seperate partition. Good strategy seeing as I run a RAID0 system.

Lately I've been doing it with rsync. Great tool, rsync. Problem is, the cpu would jump to 100% when doing this, and often time the system would do a panic and hard reset. Hmm. Sometimes, when it was being especially malicious, the memory usage reported by gkrellm would gradually approach 100%, at which time the swap usage would climb and climb, until that too would reach 100%, and the system would OOM and do a reboot. I noticed that it was because I was specifying the z option to rsync, which means that I want to compress the data stream, but since I'm just backing up to localhost, this is pointless.

Then I discovered SquashFS. I decided to make my backup partition a squashfs one, and the same mem usage, swap filling situation occured. This is especially interesting, seeing as I have a gig of ram and a gig of swap. Luckily, I've been able to keep the system up so far by killing the mksquashfs process or rsync process before I lose all desktop interactivity. I don't know what's going on.
_________________
word.

[bunder]

Are you using rieser4? I heard that it can lock up when doing large file manipulations.
_________________