Re: Slow swapon for big (12GB) swap

From: Grzegorz Kulewski
Date: Mon Apr 10 2006 - 06:25:25 EST


On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am using big swap here (as a backing for potentially huge tmpfs). And I
wonder why swapon on such big (like 12GB) swap takes about 7 minutes
(continuous disk IO).

It's a bit quicker here:

vmm:/usr/src/25# mkswap /dev/hda6
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 54031826 kB
vmm:/usr/src/25# time swapon /dev/hda6
swapon /dev/hda6 0.00s user 0.04s system 74% cpu 0.054 total


Is this expected?

Nope.

Why it is like that?

Are you using a swapfile or a swap partition?

Swap file.


If it's a swapfile then perhaps the filesystem is being inefficient in its
bmap() function. Which filesystem is it?

Ext3.

The kernel is 2.6.16-rc3-git2-ck1. There is -ck patch in it but I strongly hope that swap prefetch is not *that* buggy to cause such things... I am considering testing vanilla. Con CC'd.

The system is Athlon XP 2000MHz with 1GB of RAM and Samsung 80GB IDE hard drive.

The second run of swapon is very fast (like 2 seconds). So it looks like it has cached something in RAM?...


Thanks,

Grzegorz Kulewski

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