I have a system that is (sometimes) used as an ftp server to serve g4u disk images. Current machine is a Dell PowerEdge R320 with 16GB memory running 6.1_STABLE from yesterday.
If I get 3 ftp clients all reading the same 45GB image from it I quickly get into the situation that all memory is used by something and the machine becomes very unresponsive. Below is the output of top while in this state: load averages: 3.38, 1.56, 0.68; up 0+16:11:05 14:51:52 43 processes: 2 runnable, 38 sleeping, 3 on CPU CPU0 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 23.6% system, 0.0% interrupt, 76.4% idle CPU1 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 4.1% system, 0.0% interrupt, 95.9% idle CPU2 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 28.5% system, 0.0% interrupt, 71.5% idle CPU3 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 2.1% system, 0.0% interrupt, 97.9% idle CPU4 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 3.8% system, 0.0% interrupt, 96.2% idle CPU5 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 78.9% system, 0.0% interrupt, 21.1% idle Memory: 15G Act, 113M Inact, 15M Wired, 29M Exec, 15G File, 112K Free Swap: 8192M Total, 8192M Free PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND 0 root 126 0 0K 29M CPU/1 3:37 99.76% 99.76% [system] 7173 root 79 0 53M 4588K CPU/2 1:52 36.13% 36.13% ftpd 6931 root 113 0 53M 4588K RUN/2 1:13 28.42% 28.42% ftpd 7025 root 115 0 53M 4588K RUN/1 2:03 26.61% 26.61% ftpd 6601 root 43 0 17M 1876K CPU/5 0:01 4.05% 4.05% top If I just run two ftp clients there seems to be about 5GB of Inactive memory and performance is "fine". Previously I had an i386 box running 5.x or 6.x doing this job and it could quite happily have 10-15 clients slurping images at once. So whats going on? cheers mark