On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 12:46:22 +1030 (CST) "Glen Turner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Christopher Booth wrote: > > The machine is probably running out of memory and thrasing the disk > because it is writing to swap. The I/O queues get very long, and any > process that needs I/O stalls. Anything else you do simply forces more > memory to be paged in or out, worsening the I/O situation. Eventually > anything that needs memory stalls. > > If you have enough swap then waiting a while, changing to the text console > and killing the biggest memory hog will probably get the machine back. > I couldn't even get any key strokes to register, to change to the text console > The Linux 2.4 kernel is really horrible for this problem. The combination > of poor virtual memory performance and high latency when doing disk I/O > make swap thrashing a lot worse than it need be. > > Your swap should be about double the amount of physical memory. Even then > you will get some swap thrashing, this is why big UNIX machines have > separate swap disks. > That would be why, I have 128MB ram and 70 meg swap partition, I might have to create a secondary swap file. Can a swap file reside on the fat16 partition as that is the only partition that I've got write access to with space on it? Chris -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
