In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 29 Feb 2004, Mark Maunder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm assuming the httpd processes are in swap, because according to > the ps docs, processes surrounded by [square brackets] are swapped > out. But I think ps might be lying because as soon as I start > apache, the processes appear as [httpd], and even if I blast the > server, they stay []'d.
What it really means is that the command line arguments have been lost by the kernel. In reality, Linux almost never swaps out processes (although it does page parts of them out), and you can see from the resident size column that your httpd processes aren't swapped out, either. You can monitor how many pages have been paged out using gtop or the oldps(1) command (use the 'm' argument for memory info) that is part of some procps packages. As for why your kernel is losing the command line arguments, that was a behavior peculiar to some Linux kernels (in particular, mid-range 2.4.x kernels). If you upgrade to a newer 2.4.x kernel or downgrade to an older one, that behavior should go away. None of this addresses your original question of how to prevent the swapping/paging, of course, but gtop and oldps should allow you to verify if the solution you implement is working. -ccwf -- Charles C. Fu ,-- Founder ___ __ __. . ,-/-- Web i18n, LLC (_,(_,|/|/ / www.web-i18n.net ----' -- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
