Excessive swapping using afio

Mike Black (mblack@csihq.com)
Wed, 01 May 1996 11:00:23 -0400

I'm running a backup script that uses afio and gzip. It eventually starts
causing a LOT of swapping activity for no apparent reason. This is on 1.3.97
but has been happening for a long time.

r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id
1 0 0 2996 588 396 6640 174 1 44 1 505 210 24 23 53
2 0 0 2996 276 384 6992 263 0 67 1 701 272 15 27 59
1 0 0 2996 520 324 6232 226 0 57 1 622 247 25 24 52
1 0 0 2996 500 380 6572 145 0 38 1 464 195 24 20 57
1 0 0 3012 256 356 7000 171 0 46 2 522 207 23 20 57
1 0 0 3084 268 400 6704 147 1 37 2 470 196 33 19 48
0 0 0 3084 476 400 6664 16 0 4 1 146 31 3 3 94
1 0 0 3084 260 400 6712 142 0 36 0 444 167 34 16 50
1 0 0 3084 564 400 6644 130 0 32 2 419 166 40 14 47
2 0 0 2876 372 460 6732 67 0 45 2 374 157 49 15 36 <<
killed afio process
0 0 0 2868 264 460 6792 1 0 0 0 159 59 29 3 67
0 0 0 2868 264 460 6792 0 0 0 12 130 13 1 2 97

The process only eats up about 1Meg:

Name: afio
State: S (sleeping)
Pid: 2734
PPid: 2722
Uid: 0 0 0 0
Gid: 0 0 0 0
VmSize: 976 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmRSS: 364 kB
VmData: 408 kB
VmStk: 12 kB
VmExe: 0 kB
VmLib: 20 kB
SigPnd: 00000000
SigBlk: 00000000
SigIgn: 80001000
SigCgt: 00000002

Can anybody help me out here? I think this may be cause by the "spawn
child" option of afio. I'll do some more testing to try to isolate.
Meanwhile, anybody go any other ideas?
-
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