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! Thanks, Dimitris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/