Carlo, In case you missed it, pay particular attention to this post from Matt Palmer. In particular these bits.
Matthew Palmer wrote: > What I suspect might be happening (and which is supported by the top output > you gave; see below) is that you're hitting swap and the system is grinding > to a halt. What's really odd is that you've still got umpteen GB of free > memory -- I'd expect the system to use that before hitting swap. Maybe your > top output is anomalous, though. <snip> > Swap evidence: > > > CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle > > total 0.4% 0.0% 0.2% 0.0% 0.0% 12.1% 87.0% > > cpu00 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% > > cpu01 0.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 99.0% > > cpu02 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% > > cpu03 0.0% 0.0% 1.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 98.0% > > cpu04 2.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 97.0% 0.0% > ^^^^^ > > Massive iowait is a very common sign of massive swapping. It's not the only > possible cause, but it's certainly the most common IME... > > > Mem: 9879976k av, 2391196k used, 7488780k free, 0k shrd, 35592k > > buff > > 2009064k actv, 134928k in_d, 83160k in_c > > Swap: 2044072k av, 1022036k used, 1022036k free 246204k > > ... especially when you're 1G into hock. > > The odd bit is the 7.4GB of free memory that's sitting there. I can't > imagine why the system would be shoving stuff into swap when there was large > gobs of available memory, but it's possible that a *very* large process just > terminated when you snapped this output. I'd look at top output more > closely. There's also various options to sar (-R, -W) that'll show you how > quickly pages are being brought in and out. Erik -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ Erik de Castro Lopo +-----------------------------------------------------------+ "Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it." -- Camille Paglia _______________________________________________ coders mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/coders
