2.3.99pre7 kswapd eats CPU!

From: Mark Tranchant (mark@tranchant.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Sat May 13 2000 - 03:30:58 EST


I have a 486DX4/120 with 40MB of RAM running Red Hat 6.1. I've just installed
2.3.99-pre7, having followed most of the 2.3.99-pre series.

I know this has been discussed, but here's another data point; VM
performance is terrible.

At the moment, "free" gives:

             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 38696 29628 9068 0 172 9636
-/+ buffers/cache: 19820 18876
Swap: 133016 1756 131260

...so I have plenty of spare RAM. This is running KDE but not much else. I just
started kmail, and it took much longer than previously to load, with much disk
activity. kswapd sat at the top of the "top" listing for a couple of refresh
cycles (about 8s each!) with CPU usage of 30-60%. The actual amount of swap
used changed by about 200KB after kmail had loaded.

I know I don't have a monster CPU, but the amount of disk activity seems
disproportionate to the task in hand.

I've just tried loading Netscape, and it's still tryng to load as I write! A
snapshot of "top" shows:

     2 root 10 0 0 0 0 SW 0 42.7 0.0 1:09 kswapd
  661 root 5 0 2044 4 2040 S 0 8.4 5.2 0:59 X
  719 mark 12 0 348 4 344 R 0 3.7 0.8 0:31 top
  763 mark 0 0 576 0 576 S 0 2.1 1.4 0:00 netscape-comm
  737 mark 1 0 2024 92 1932 S 0 1.9 4.9 0:18 kmail
  746 mark 0 0 716 0 716 D 0 1.8 1.8 0:01 ld-linux.so.2

Now Netscape has loaded, I still only have 5.5MB swapped and 16MB cache. kswapd
has taken over 1min 30s of my 25min uptime! I'm going back to 2.3.99-pre6.

-- 
Mark Tranchant
mark@tranchant.freeserve.co.uk

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