[Please forgive me to give supplementary information gathered for all answers and "before". And thank you to all for answering.]
To be more precise: The node is not a desktop node but a server one (so there is no X11 running, so no firefox or whatever), with two main functions: 1) A file server; 2) A processing node for data (GIS) manipulations, since there can be huge amounts of data to process, so it is more efficient to process where it is saved due to the network capabilities. The node' uptime is 225 days (since some disk replacements) serving during office time files to 2 to 6 nodes. And it is processing data (sometimes during office time; generally outside office time). It has 3862 MB of avail memory. When using a program to convert coordinates, this program being a Linux binary, the program bailed out, 3 times in a row, after processing 20M records. Splitting the input data under this amount, I managed to process everything. => This is why I jumped to the conclusion that the program had memory leak because processing should be one line of input at a time so whatever the number of lines, I fail to see why it would need more memory for more records. I found, afterwards, in /var/log/messages, that this program was killed because "out of swap". => Since it was the only one I've seen doing this and since it was under emulation I jumped to the conclusion that it had something to do with allocating in the swap. => This conclusion was false because (after sending the message) I looked in the /var/log/messages* to see if such a message had appeared before for other programs. I found (the log go back to 2014...) that it had appeared a couple of times with another program: postgres. So the emulation has indeed nothing to do with it. [Postgres is not used for its network capabilities and the instances that were killed were statistics and internal administration so it went unnoticed, postgres being overkill for the application and being soon replaced, when a query language is necessary, with sqlite3 files---and basic files when no query language but only key indexing is necessary.] Concerning my sentence "RAM is not exhausted", my assumption (another one...) was that when memory for processing was getting scarced, file caching was reduced since there seems to be a basic "page" device for files: the file on disk. So for me, when there was still a huge amount of memory for file caching there was still a huge amount of memory as spare for programs at the detriment of file caching hence speed. Am I totally wrong about this? (I was monitoring other processes with top(1) that's why I have seen memory statistics) Best regards, T. Laronde On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 08:45:34AM +0200, ignat...@cs.uni-bonn.de wrote: > Hello, > > On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 08:46:08PM +0200, tlaro...@polynum.com wrote: > > > an exhaustion of the NetBSD swap partition > > the RAM is not exhausted... > > I beg your pardon? What exactly is happening? Does swapctl -l > claim it's full? What does vmstat say? > > also: i think you shold be able to see with > > fstat -p insertthepidhere > > what the open files are (well, Inode number and file system). > Any of them on a file system that's a tmpfs? But still, ram would > be a problem, too. > > Regards, > -is -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ http://www.sbfa.fr/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C