Linus's VM: Evil swap frenzy (64M RAM): Stuck in freeing/swapping?

Benjamin Redelings I (bredelin@ucsd.edu)
Wed, 30 Dec 1998 23:00:28 -0800

Hi, I'm have test1-linux-2.2.0-pre2, and about 3 times my machine has
swapped out 10MB for no reason. The system was unuseable (the cursor
wouldn't move in X) for about 7 seconds. When this occurred tonight, I
finally ended with a situation like this:

telomere:~> free
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 63412 39212 24200 13084 780
21184
-/+ buffers/cache: 17248 46164
Swap: 34236 8724 25512

Before I could run 'free' (a few seconds), about 1.5 MB was swapped
BACK IN (i.e 10-8.5=1.5). But you can see that, with 24M free, there is
was no need to swap out anything!
The last time this happened, X was swapped out (with kernel 2.1.132 I
think), but it did NOT get swapped back in. I also had about 24Mb free,
but whenever I moved an xterm, the system would swap in furiously, and
would use something like 10MB of RAM (according to xosview 1.6.1), which
would be freed immediately after I stopped moving the window. Spooky.
Anybody have any idea why this is happening?
-BenRI

-- 
Benjamin Redelings I       <><      http://sdcc13.ucsd.edu/~bredelin


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