I believe it was more like the kernel was tuned to make it less common, but certain things can still trigger it. I know the problem was still there in the 2.4.24 on the last server I was playing with, but it was a lot less of a problem than it had been under 2.4.9 on an earlier machine with the same basic amount of memory.
On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 12:47, Joshua D. Drake wrote: > Hello, > > I would have to double check BUT I believe this is fixed in later 2.4.x > kernels as well. If you don't want to go through the hassle of 2.6 > (although it really is a nice kernel) then upgrade to 2.4.26. > > Sincerely, > > Joshau D. Drake > > Scott Marlowe wrote: > > On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 09:11, Tom Lane wrote: > > > >>"Domenico Sgarbossa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> > >>>so when the users go home, i've got something like 15/20000kb free ram, the > >>>rest is cached and 0kb of swap... > >>>It seems that when pg_dump starts the cached memory isn't released so the > >>>system begin to swap, > >> > >>A sane kernel should drop disk buffers rather than swapping. We heard > >>recently about a bug in some versions of the Linux kernel that cause it > >>to prefer swapping to discarding disk cache, though. It sounds like > >>that's what you're hitting. Look into newer kernels ... > > > > > > This was a common problem in the linux 2.4 series kernels, but has > > supposedly been fixed in the 2.6 kernels. Having lots of memory and > > turning off swap will "fix" the problem in 2.4, but if you run out of > > real mem, you're hosed. > > > > > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > > TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
