2.6.0-test3 memory problems?

vericgar · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 7:40 am Post subject: 2.6.0-test3 memory problems?

Hello all, I was wondering if anybody else was experiencing memory problems with the kernel?

What seems to me to be happening is as pages are swapped out and then no longer needed (i.e. the program that allocated them ends) the pages aren't cleared out of swap. Over about 4 days of normal usage (web browsing via firebird, occasional MP3 with XMMS, a few aterms, etc) my swap will be full, memory full, and the kernel starts killing apps until I reboot.

My system is a 500Mhz K6-2 with 320MB of physical memory and 640MB of swap.

When nearing the point of running out of memory I ran top and added up the memory usage from there and it didn't come anywhere close to swap+physical (it was something like 200MB).

Any pointers on how to debug this further would be great, or if someone knows how to fix this that would be excellent.

BTW, a quick google search turned up this which sounds very similar to what I'm experiencing, but it seems he is running 2.4.20 and not a dev kernel, but I really can't tell.
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+~+ Sometimes a good ole loving kick is all it needs +~+

Yarrick · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 8:31 am Post subject:

i have had similar problems, with a lot af swapping activity. i have 192mb ram and i disabled my swap partition and now everything runs nice. It never started killing apps on me, but it seemed to think having something in swap was better than in ram...

vericgar · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 9:27 am Post subject:

I tried going without swap, but for everything I like to do I keep running out of physical memory (wmmemload usually shows my physical memory at about 97-100% most of the time), so turning off swap is a no-go... everything is even less stable then. Is there some way to free swap that isn't being used anymore?
_________________
+~+ Sometimes a good ole loving kick is all it needs +~+

Caffeine · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 10:29 am Post subject:

Does wmmemload tell you what percentage of ram is used for disk cache? It's normal for physical memory to be close to 100% used - Any memory not used for running programs is used for disk cache/buffers.

For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with swap filling up with 2.6-test3. Although I haven't had 4 days of uptime yet. I'll keep an eye on it.

vericgar · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 8:52 pm Post subject:

caffeine> when things do start swapping out for you, after you close a few apps, does the swap percentage ever go down? For me it's not and that's what the problem is. The system is perfectly stable and acts normal until I do something memory intesive that causes it to start swapping, then from there the swap starts filling up and it eventually runs out of memory.

Memory intesive can be anything from running a program that has some memory leaks (I hear XMMS has a few), or loading a large website in Firebird (or any one with Java or Flash on it for that matter, both those are memory hogs), to switching desktops between graphic intensive software. I just completely filled up my swap in about 5 hours when working on a web page, switching desktops many times a minutes to check changes (had firebird open in one desktop, aterm in another),

It seems as if having idesk running was causing a lot of the memory problems with desktop switching though, so we'll see how it goes without that running (memory doesn't spike when I switch desktops now). But that is avoiding the problem, not fixing it... I'm avoiding anything going into swap.

Any ideas? I think I'm going to play with my kernel config tonight, see if there's anything options I can change that might improve swapping performance.
_________________
+~+ Sometimes a good ole loving kick is all it needs +~+

Yarrick · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 9:09 pm Post subject:

after some time it started killing my mozilla so i reactivated my swap. so far it has been behaving